Fish in Motion

The Story of Stuff

2012-02-01T22:49:00.003-05:00

When I got married in 1991, forest green and dusty rose were the big colours. Before my nine (or was it ten?) bridal showers, I was required to register for china, silver, bedroom linens, towels, and teapots. (Did you know that the number of teapots you receive -- chuckle, chuckle -- tells you how many kids you'll have? We received eight. Or was it nine?)

Some of the registering and the gifts seemed over the top, even then, but others felt terrific. Having been the Emptier-of-the-Dishwasher for many years growing up, I welcomed the opportunity to have all matching cutlery. In fact, I'm still really fond of my flatware, more than two decades later.

But lately, I've noticed a new phenomenon creeping into my life: I've started to embrace the mix-matchedness of things. A few years back we emptied my grandfather's hoarder house, and I brought home some pale green glass bowls and a small crystal pitcher. (And a few bow ties.) Another time, a friend offered us dinner plates that had been his mother's. (She had many, many sets. We took eight plates and use them regularly.) Last year, I took possession of my grandma's recipe book, but also her Corningware mixing bowls and some small juice glasses. Our kitchen no longer lines up neatly and tidily, with all white plates, but it tells a story.

And it doesn't end there. As I walk the dog around the neighbourhood, I look at houses. What intrigues me, day after day, is not the magazine-perfect homes, but the quirky ones. The one with the collection of frogs poised around a small well. The one with china horses arranged in a window. The one with stained glass hanging in the centre of a picture window. The ones that tell the story of a life that is unique and unashamed.

It takes money to have all your things match. It takes courage to live your own life. I wonder as I walk, what goes on in the different houses. Are they all watching the same television shows -- or are some of them constructing scale models and composing music together? Are they all surfing the web or are some of them hooking rugs of their own design?

As I said, I still like my matchy-matchy cutlery. I have no plans to curate either frogs or china horses. But more and more, I want to live freely and to let my life tell its story, and to let my stuff do the same.

The Grey: Roots and Tips

2012-01-27T13:24:00.004-05:00

Little tip for you if you're thinking of going grey: Be as tall as you can be. This helps in two respects. One, your increasingly pale hairline is visible only to people taller than you. Also, your height makes you slightly intimidating and no one will whisper to you that your roots are showing.

Another tip: Embrace the grey! When we were in Florida last year, the chlorine and sun stripped some of the colour out of my hair and I had to pop into a Walgreens to get some hair dye. Not this year. This year, we sat at a table playing euchre, and we all had to come up with our Card Playing Names. Mine was [pause to run hands through hair, lower voice to exciting whisper] The Silver Streak. I still had strands of tinsel in my hair in Florida too. I guess I could have been The Silver Streaks. The tinsel was a good idea -- it meant I felt festive, sparkly and silly rather than drab and old.

Three: Think about the meaning of the grey. I just came across an old photo taken six years ago when my book came out. That was the summer I had gold highlights put in my hair, to see whether I could allow the grey to grow in by using a variety of tones. (The answer then was no.) The same month my book came out, too, we changed churches. I always thought that was strange, but I don't believe now that it was a coincidence. Though we left relatively happily, I think I was a bit like an animal, seeking a safe place to give birth, an authentic place. So too with this grey experience. I was a bit disappointed with my photo in the newspaper the other week because my hair looked blah -- I wished I had either kept it brown or that I had fully grown out the grey in advance of launching my business. After reflecting, though, I'm more okay with it though. I think I needed another step toward authenticity to accompany this next step on the journey.

Finally: You're not the centre of the universe. And neither am I. While it's been fun to monitor the process, it's also a bit boring. Who really cares what colour my hair is? Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter -- that's how the saying goes. It reminds me of going to my 20-year high school reunion and how different some of us looked fro mhow we used to -- but ten minutes in, we had reconnected and everything seemed the same. Same here. Designer labels, Value Village, ten more pounds, fifteen fewer pounds. Unless you're a celebrity, your every change is not scrutinized. So -- to all of us -- let's live a little more freely, embracing our flaws and growing pains, looking outward rather than sitting around watching our hair grow.

Doggie Valentines

2012-01-26T11:36:00.002-05:00

My dog wrote a poem the other day. He's been pretty worried about Valentine's Day coming up. His best friend dog is a girl -- but she's not his girlfriend. That's the problem: what to give a girl for Valentine's Day without sending her the wrong message? Plus chocolate could kill her. He asked the boys what they thought -- they didn't really have relevant advice.

And so, suddenly, a poem:

Roses are red
Poop is brown
You are the wuffest
Girl-dog in town

It's either that or he bites her ears off.

Happy Birthday DS

2012-01-25T20:31:00.000-05:00

Happy 45th birthday DS. Or is it 44th?

In any event, I know today is your birthday, just as I know my best friend from grade 5’s is April 12, Steve and John’s are July 3 and 5, Leigh who played Barbies with me too long, her birthday is December 28. There are days and people who stick in your mind.

You became my third boyfriend when life imitated art: we had to kiss in a play. You the prince, me the ugly duckling. You had brown eyes, all slow and dreamy, from ideas and pot. You smoked although not around me, and at parties, I forgot that some people were using substances to get as giddy as I got on life.

You said I was self-actualized. You made me a music tape of songs that still remind me of you and that cusp of adulthood. Your dad drove us to the graduation on the elevated highway in his tiny snug convertible, his girlfriend in the front seat, us squashed in the back seat, all dressed up, our hair flying in the sunshine.

I gave you the only copy of the sweetest photo ever taken of me – and my mother still holds this against me as well she should. I took you on a tall ship cruise around the harbour and they played Russians as we turned into the bay. We were practising the play the day the Challenger blew up. I remember where we were. The Salvation Army band played and the children brought lemonade. The morning lasted all day, all day.

You broke my heart and I forgave you, and then I broke yours a few months later. I hope you forgive me too. You left to study art and that was eventually that. I ran into you at a mall the day before my wedding. I’m getting married tomorrow, I blurted out. Congratulations you said, and then we wished each other well.

I’ve tracked down all my boyfriends, made sure you’re all alive and well. That’s the extent of my stalking. I found you a couple of years ago, still a friend of a friend. The year you started to teach, your class was the age of my daughter. We exchanged brief hellos and then dropped out of each other’s lives again.

Most people hated high school. I think you might have. Not me. I look back on it as the time when the world opened up and I got a glimpse of what was ahead.

I have no regrets – either about the time we spent together or that that was all. I guess, for your birthday, I want to know that I remember you well and fondly, that I wish you happiness and peace, that I never was anywhere near as self-actualized as you thought, not by half and less so now. Half a lifetime later.

Troppo

2012-01-24T18:51:00.003-05:00

We were driving along a causeway highway, with bright stucco houses with clay roofs and hurricane shutters beside us on one side, their mailboxes either shaped like dolphins or manatees, and with tall seagrass and trails on the other side. The day was brighter than bright. We had passed surf shops and tattoo parlors, a lone Starbucks and lots of rundown but still open restaurants, including one with a sand floor. To our left was the ocean and to our right was a wetland, and then a bay.

We had the windows open and the warm air poured over us.

"What would you do for a living if we lived here?" I asked my husband.

He decided he'd likely give up teaching, be a driver of some sort. I thought I'd probably be on a Fun Team, running bingos and crafts at a resort.

Instead, here we are. A land of snow. I've just returned from walking the dog. Both the dog and I had near slips on black ice. The wind whipped at us. I return to a desk filled with papers, empty coffee cups and ideas. Dave stayed at work late tonight, working on a project he rarely gets to during the day when other are around.

I choose this, I thought the other day. I'd rather live up to my potential than go troppo. Troppo was a term we learned in Australia years ago -- derived from tropical, and fueled by sun and sand, it's a description of a state of mind where you really could not care less, and where tan lines may be your biggest problem.

I choose this, I say again.

Except.

Today I wanted azure sea and geranium pink flowers. I wanted orange blossoms and fresh-picked fruits. I wanted seagulls that were white against a brilliant blue sky, instead of the unfortunate gray ones against an even grayer sky.

I choose this.

But I also choose small escapes. And I hope for you to tell me your escapes and dreams. What colours and scents and places and tastes do you long for these days?

PPD

2012-01-22T11:59:00.002-05:00

I had mild post-partum depression after one of my kids, so possibly I shouldn't call this that.

A million years ago, I worked for an advertising agency. It was in the late 80s when money flowed like water, and events were splashy. I remember my job interview where when I agreed I'd like a cup of coffee, I was asked if I took bleach. It went on from there.

One of my favourite people at the agency is still a friend today. It's to Allan I get my idea that planes work by mirrors -- he had clients in the aerospace industry -- and also my idea that after a big event, one is entitled to a wee bit of post-partum depression. Whether one is male or female.

I didn't have a post-Christmas letdown, because I was heading off to Florida. I didn't have a post-holiday letdown because I was launching a company. So, I think it's only fair that I'm operating at half-speed this weekend: making food, doing laundry, reading, doing necessary work but not a speck more. And not a lot of Public Appearances.

Thursday night was the big night. It snowed all day long with whiteouts that caused multiple accidents. Someone called to ask if the event was still on. It was. Two lovely women drove for many hours to be there, and to meet with me ahead of time -- if they could do it, the rest of us could. Several people referred to the event as a "meeting" which made me a little nervous: were they expecting a program? Would I be forced to reprise my karaoke to entertain them?

My own plan was that this would be a networking night with almost no program, an opportunity for writers and fledgling writers to meet their own tribe. I told a story on Thursday night about this: how years ago, I had gone to the Fergus Highland Games and wandered between the booths, all marked McPherson, Mackenzie, McDonald, MacDonald, and felt like a mutt without a pedigree. "Who is ma clan?" I said, aloud and then, wiser, under my breath. I found my clan when I began to meet other writers and to really talk shop. (A friend once asked me what I was doing, writing-wise. "I'm trying to decide how a guy would react the day after he slept with one of his co-workers." I replied, honestly. She gulped, sorry she'd asked. Good friend. Different clan.)

I was providing tickets for refreshments on Thursday night -- your ticket would get you a bambino-sized gelata, a cupcake or a cup of special hot chocolate. I had door prizes. Beyond that, I had what I hoped was a good idea and a friendly smile.

And they came. Despite the weather and two other fine cultural events within a one-kilometre radius, they came. Despite the fact that I only knew about half of them, they came. They came and they ate gelata and they talked to me about their projects and then they talked with one another. They built connections and relationships, made plans for future meetings and writers groups. They shared struggles and joys, trade secrets and best practices.

The very best compliment of the evening came when I overheard someone ask one of the editors who works with me whether Storywell, my fledgling company, was a not-for-profit. I piped in that it was an attempted-for-profit company, but the reason I felt so delighted was that it assured me that my good idea was one that served people well. Some of what I'm doing will generate income, but some of it will also serve the writing community and the reading community.

I went home wuffed out, as my dog would say, but really excited for what comes next. I sat on the couch in what my friend called my "sexy librarian outfit" and smiled, too tired to do anything else but dream.

67 Hours Later

2012-01-17T10:03:00.005-05:00

You agree to a slight detour and leave the highway in a small Florida town. You turn onto the Ronald Reagan Parkway and then make a righthand turn onto a small sideroad, flanked by bike lanes and the same dense tropical forest you've seen along the way. Half a mile up the road, you turn into a small parking lot, where you are instructed by signs not to back into the parking spaces. There are three other cars in the parking lot. You get out and stretch, use the small restroom facilities, walk past the children's playground and onto the raised boardwalk. You pass a family with two small children walking back and one middle-aged man.

Six hundred feet later, you think you see it ahead of you and then suddenly you let out a gasp which makes your family think crocodile or snake. But no, to your left, emerging from the foliage, standing tall as a mountain rises one of the biggest trees you've ever seen. You've been to Vancouver Island's Cathedral Grove before, so you've seen big trees, but this one still has the power to shock and amaze. Signs tell you the tree was bigger until a 1920s hurricane lobbed the top third off the tree. A small sign indicates the name of the company that now protects this tree from lightning strikes. A bronze plaque installed by President Calvin Coolidge notes the foresight of those who came before, who allowed this tree to grow and grow. These, you find out, were largely the Seminoles, natives of Florida, who used this tree as a landmark.

The big tree is called The Senator. It's a pond cypress. It is 3500 years old. It was old and massive at the time of Christ. It precedes the Great Wall of China, Cleopatra. It's a contemporary of Moses. It has fresh leaves at the top.

As you walk to its sister tree, the one you thought was the big one, the one that's only 2000 years old, Lady Liberty, you remember Cathedral Grove and the warnings to avoid the park on windy days, lest one of the monoliths suddenly topple. They do without warning. There are no such signs here.

On the way back to the car, you stop to look at a cardinal in the leaf litter, a small stream passing under the boardwalk, and to note the sparseness of undergrowth between the trees.

You get back into your car after this quiet interlude, glad to have made the discovery.

67 hours later, you are home. It is cold and still dark when the telephone call comes from your mother, who is still in Florida. Her voice is shaken up.

"That big tree burned down this morning," she says. "The one you went to see." The one she planned to see for the first time this week.

You feel heartsick, stunned. You find footage and photos and feel worse. A dozen firefighters struggled with hoses in vain as the tree burned from the top down, inside out. You read how this tree used to be a major Florida attraction, before the Mouse came. You tell others but they weren't there, didn't sense the majesty as you tilted your heads as far as they would go in order to be able to see the top.

3500 years. 118 feet in height. 400 inches in diameter. The world's fifth oldest tree. It burned then collapsed like the Towers in New York.

No one was hurt in the blaze or the fall. Arson is highly unlikely. And wood burns.

But still, and likely because you were just there, not even three days before, it feels devastating, this loss. You think about all the history that went up in smoke and down in ashes.

The only consolation is that you did go, that you did see its glory, that you did gasp out loud. 67 hours before.

Time after Time

2012-01-15T20:16:00.005-05:00

I live with a physicist and a son who last week, reading H.G. Wells The Time Machine, exclaimed that he had never before read such a lucid explanation of the fourth dimension. In this mix, I am the one who believes planes work by mirrors, so I really shouldn't venture a time theory, but here goes.

Every time I go on vacation and return, I have the same image in my mind although I've never put it into words. Imagine, if you will, that a vacation is like an ant traveling across the pages of a book open in the middle. It takes the ant a good long time to make his or her way across to the far side of the book. Now -- and no ants were squished in the making of this image -- imagine that as the ant gets to the very edge of the book, the book is closed, so that the starting and ending points come together to be very close. Maybe there's a big physics explanation for this concept but that's how it feels. I had this fascinating, good long week of holidays and now, in a certain way, it feels like I was barely gone at all.

The additional theory that came to mind is that for me last week was filled with specific activities -- Tuesday was the day we swam in the ocean, Thursday was Gatorland, Wednesday it rained and we shopped until we dropped. But other weeks? or your last week? Maybe it dragged and maybe it flew by. Maybe, in terms of how it felt, you're already halfway through next week or perhaps you're still on Wednesday.

I had another experience of time last week -- being out of time. On Friday, my family and I visited Blue Springs State Park, about an hour north of Orlando. We had been warned that the park would be busy, but there was actually an overflow parking lot outside the park, and park wardens only letting people in when others left. It was a springlike day with pale watery sunlight that was only warm out of the wind.

The park was crowded and noisy with school buses, families, elderly people and daycare outings. The main source of the attraction was the fact that the Blue Springs are hot springs flowing downhill to the St. John's River and out to sea; this spring becomes the winter home for hundreds of manatees.

When you first see a manatee, it looks like a rock, a blob in the water, snuffling along the bottom and occasionally surfacing for air.

Everyone else in my family wanted to go on a 2.5 hour boat ride. I really didn't. We decided it would be okay for me to stay behind. If worse came to worst, I would knit or do some work on my novel.

Worse never came to worst.

Instead, I had the most meditative experience, walking along the fabulous boardwalk, between outlooks over the river and groves of prehistoric-looking tropical forests. It was the first cool day of our trip. The air reminded me, strangely enough, of the time we spent in Italy in March several years ago -- thin and clear, like a drink of cool water.

The water beside me, though, was not cool. It is 72 degrees year round, thanks to the hot spring bubbling up from the earth. It is this warmth that attracts the manatees that are resident in winter-time. Manatees are thin-skinned mammals that need warmth to survive. They are also apparently highly social and intelligent. The spring water is clearer than clear, and tinged blueish-green thanks to minerals that come from the spring.

I walked to the head of the spring, and one of the signs along the way explained that the water came from a cave that reached 140 feet into the ground. I walked three-quarters around the end of the stream, looking on the sides of the embankment for the cliff. I overheard a couple talking about when they used to swim in the river. I asked them where the cave entrance was and they pointed to the river floor, to what I had thought was a shadow or a different-coloured rock at the bottom. Instead it was a place where the earth opened up. I was fascinated.

We talked about the fish that swam in the river -- big fish with varying shapes. Some of the fish seemed to cling to the backs of the manatees and I asked them about that. Their daughter, all of three or four, was scrambling around on a tree stump.

"What would you call that kind of relationship?" the dad asked the girl.
"Sym-bi-otic!" she declared, and I knew that I had found my kind of people. I met others when I chose to -- offering to take a photo for a family so they could all be in the picture, listening to a man describe the time he touched a manatee that approached his fishing boat.

I wandered through a homestead, established in the mid-1800s, that had been preserved. I read the family Bible list of births and deaths, including the death of a six-year old first son of the settlers, from a rattlesnake bite while playing under the house.

I talked with two marine biologists who were swimming in the water, looking to tag a female manatee that had been badly injured by a propeller. She was stealthy, they said, because the other time she had been tagged was when she had lost a flipper to a fishing net, and she had bad associations. She had been retagged with this injury but managed to escape the buoy by the next day. The biologists swam the length of the river twice looking for her, before deciding to practice new tagging techniques on a cooperative manatee who liked human touch. I was profoundly jealous of their opportunity until they asked a man whether he had seen any alligators that day. I had seen a little one, but they told me that the river was home to a number of alligators -- a four-foot, six-foot, eight-foot and sixteen-foot alligator. "I only like the four-foot one," the biologist told me. "The one that doesn't want to eat us yet."

But mostly, I was quiet as I watched the manatees as they swam, slowly and quickly, foraging, rolling, nursing, playing, resting. I came to find them beautiful and the sound of their exhale as they surfaced was peaceful and made my own breathing slow.

I had taken my watch off before our holidays -- wanting to be off the clock -- but it was this day when I was really out of time, lost in a quiet world of warm currents and gentle creatures that surfaced and retreated like deep thoughts in a well-rested mind.

I Had The Time of My Life

2012-01-15T19:50:00.002-05:00

Before this past week, I had never sung karaoke before. I'm not a person with a bucket list but if I were, singing karaoke would definitely have made the top ten. It really shouldn't have been so hard, but the only times I had ever actually been somewhere with karaoke, there had been large crowds of people who all knew each other, as well as Dave and me. My theory was that you either needed to have a group of supporters to sing with you or else, perhaps, copious amounts of alcohol. I had neither.

Wednesday and Saturday nights were karaoke nights at the resort we stayed at. Wednesday, my mom and I went and put our feet in the hot tub, listening as people embarrassed themselves with their songs or else revealed stunning voices. I tell the truth: my heart pounded in my chest. Fear and anticipation.

I went over to the dj and asked him if he had a playlist. He had a computer loaded with 32,000 songs -- what did I want? Um.....I didn't know. It was hard to think with that thumping in my ears and the sounds of other people warbling.

I went back to the dj with two ideas. He didn't have either one. He told me I was cute, being so timid and eager at the same time. We danced behind a singer.

Finally I came up with an idea, and put my name on their receipt book playlist. They called my name and I persuaded my mother to stand behind me for moral support as I sang Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams are Made of This.

I don't have a terrible voice. It's decent. I get compliments in the right crowd. This crowd clapped enthusiastically for me, but my honest assessment was that karaoke is a learned skill and that choosing the right song is key. My song was a bit low for me. Still, I felt euphoric enough to plan to venture back on Saturday night.

I lay awake one night trying to think of a really good song to sing.

Saturday was a cold, cold Florida day -- and then the sun went down. Dave, my mom and I ventured over to the pool for 80s trivia -- what was the name of Angela's son on Who's the Boss? Name all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles -- before the karaoke started.

I was far less nervous and far less excited, but I put my name on the roster. Just before it was my turn to sing, two guys came over and asked if this was a competition. The dj said no but I said sure.

My song was Bette Midler's Wind Beneath My Wings while his was Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline. My kids submerged themselves in the hot tub, facing the other direction, pretending not to know me, while I did myself more proud than I had a few nights before.

Enough so that after Mr. Diamond finished with a flourish, his friend came over to ask me if I would be willing to sing a duet with him. We looked through the playlist's search function for duets and settled on the Dirty Dancing song, I've Had the Time of My Life.

By the time it was our turn, Mr. Diamond was calling out to the crowd like an experienced lounge singer and I was having fun, while shivering in the cold. Our voices actually blended beautifully when we could figure out who was supposed to sing when and when we were to sing together. And then we gave up trying and just had fun singing.

I joined my parents afterwards at the bar where there were heat lamps doing their best and listened to an older woman belt out a jazz standard. Then I heard my name called again. I hadn't put it down on the list but it was me.

It was my closing act, the end of the week. I asked for Madonna's La Isla Bonita and rocked the house -- or at least my own house.

You might even say I had the time of my life.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

2012-01-07T15:42:00.003-05:00

T-18 hours till we leave home for a week in the sunny south. I know my word of the year is anticipation but that doesn't begin to touch my feeling for this trip. Craving would be closer. But I also have a certain amount of fear -- that somehow it won't happen. My cold/bronchitis, for instance, better not stop it.

I wanted to thank you all for reading along this week with our Chopped Challenge. Last night our daughter asked me what I had made for dinner. It was a beef stir fry on couscous or quinoa (using up leftover veggies before we leave town). "Hm," she said. "Only one course, eh?"

I know a few people have been daunted by our challenge, but I wanted to make a few observations and reflections.

First, the meals our kids cooked were mostly really inexpensive. The first meal especially probably cost a total of $10 and that included the drug-free ground beef. The fish and chicken in the other meals would have cost a bit more, but really the costs weren't significant. My second observation is that we made some suggestions that were disregarded by the kids: I suggested a lighter dessert for day 3 in place of the cheesecake, and suggested that pickled beets be part of the appetizer on day 2. I think the meals were all the better for the creativity of the kids. Third, where the meals were costly was in terms of time. Day 1 child cooked for nearly six hours. Dave spent a good chunk of time on those days helping out, but that was good time together too.

I was also struck in something I read this week that the word disciple essentially means appentice. I read this as Dave and I were coaching our kids through this process: to us, it matters that our kids know how to cook well. It made me wonder what other similar or very different skills and ways of being we teach our kids -- whether deliberately or accidentally.

I'm curious to know which of the three meals sounded to you like it would be best?

As we pack for Florida, we have a lot of food and meds packed with us, primarily for the girl with food issues. Most of what we're bringing is precautionary -- we have corn pasta in case we have trouble finding a wheat-substitute. We have digestive enzyme in case we get stuck with no good alternatives at all. We have pea butter and bread. I think we have more food and meds than clothes. I expect we won't need some of them, but then too I remember last summer's brief stay in a caboose in New York state, where our options were limited and our girl was grouchy. Grocery stores in the US are always a bit of an adventure for me at the best of times: sometimes the options dazzle me and sometimes they turn my stomach.

Back to the title of my post. My biggest hope for this week is that we will be able to be utterly carefree while we're away. The forecast says a high of 24 degrees Celsius and warm nights. One day of rain for shopping. One of our first stops will be to a little orange stand -- think the Big Apple, Ontarians -- to pick up a couple of litres of just-squeezed oj and a box of citrus for munching.

And then we're parking ourselves for a few days -- submerged like manatees in the pool. Not sure how much Internet access we'll have: we may be off the grid.

Wishing you a great week too!

Round Three

2012-01-05T19:25:00.002-05:00

OK, let's cut to the chase. This dinner tonight was so good that we didn't get any before photos of the dessert. All three dinners were very close -- within one to one and a half points out of sixty -- in terms of presentation and creativity, but tonight's dinner won by six points in terms of taste.

Our chef du jour played it cool. Threatened art installation instead of food. Said he'd start at 5:30 pm. Promised it would all be microwaved. That it would feature hot dogs.

And then last night, he took to the Internet with a plan and a pen. His ingredients were asparagus, avocado and blackberries. This morning we added Rice Chex cereal to the requirements. This might sound like the easiest combination of foods yet, but only I like asparagus, and none of us are terribly high on avocado.

Correction: none of us were high on avocado. Now we're converts.

Our chef needed a few ingredients for his meal, so once again our shoppers visited the grocery store today. Late morning, I was visiting with a friend when good baking smells wafted out to us. It was the crust for a cheesecake dessert -- graham crumbs mixed with Chex.

Much of tonight's meal came together late in the afternoon. There was time for the chef to walk the dog, bug his sister, do some homework, Facebook and Facebook some more, and then to dazzle us.

I will also say that I'm fighting off a cold and that I didn't have a big appetite before the meal. My highest praise was that tonight's meal created as well as satisfied an appetite in me.

The meal began with a tomato-avocado bruschetta served on fine china. It was so delicious. He sliced the avocado thinly and layered it on the bread before sprinkling it with the bruschetta topping, which contained tomatoes, shallots, garlic, lemon, olive oil, basil, salt and pepper. And summer sunshine.

There was a slight delay during the serving of the next course. Not only did the food need to be arranged, but the dog's pal arrived for a playdate. We called it dinner entertainment, watching the two dogs wrestle like Scar and Mufasa in The Lion King outside our window.

The next course was a vegetable-rice, with lightly breaded white fish and lemon, and a side dish of asparagus and frizzled shallots. (Full disclosure: I finished the leftover frizzled shallots while writing this post. Yum.)

And then dessert. Dessert did not have the presentation quality of the two previous courses and had a slightly gluey texture to it but it was so fine that the other contestants more or less declared themselves out of the running and asked for seconds as their consolation prize. It was a light cheesecake, served with a sour cherry-blackberry sauce and fresh blackberries. The chef had made a separate version for the child with food issues, and it was surprisingly equally good, made with tofu yoghurt and all-Chex crust.

At one point during the appetizer, I suggested that we could rig a tie and thus occasion the need for a tie breaker round, but this was vetoed. There was talk of another food game show next week in Florida, where contestants have to make edible, tasty meals out of Only-in-America foods like spray cheese and other edible oil products, but I vetoed that one.

The issue of the prize came up today, briefly. No one had expected $10,000, fortunately. No one really needed a prize beyond the glory of winning. But, given the full bellies, the satisfaction of the experiment and the happy mouths, I think it's safe and true to say we were all winners.

Round Two

2012-01-04T19:59:00.004-05:00

We're already trying to figure out ways to extend this competition -- which, I will note, has no prizes attached to it. None of the contestants have asked for prizes. It occurs to me as I write that possibly they are expecting the $10,000 won by the contestants on the real Chopped show. Let us hope they will take their prize in food/accommodation/clothing/toiletries, over a several year period.

Today's contestant was nervous about her Mystery Ingredient. As soon as she was given her initial list: zucchini, beets, baby bananas, she began her research, scouring cookbooks and the Internet, and polling parents for ideas. I will also note that an additional complicating factor to this competition is the fact that this child is limited in her diet: almost no dairy, wheat, eggs, sugar or peanuts. All competitors had to factor this into their cooking -- or offer an alternative. During last night's main course, corn pasta was substituted for this eater. Small quantities of the forbidden foods -- such as butter for browning -- were allowed.

I offered last night to tell the contestant what her mystery ingredient was, but she wanted to follow the rules. This morning, she rose early, ready to embark on her cooking, and was told that her additional ingredient was instant decaf coffee.

She had actually started a day before, by boiling beets and pickling two of them. The other beets were turned into a puree, which was spread across plates during the appetizer course. Apparently she plated the appetizer course two or three times not liking the presentation enough, and having inherited the competition gene.

She spent the morning making maple cupcakes for dessert, and then had a major problem. Most of the rest of her food would not take long to make. She had hours to fill and nothing she wanted to do so much as cook. (I know - I should have sent her to your house, right?)

Her sous-chef (they all want Dad as a sous-chef, allegedly because he once nearly cut the tip of his finger off while cooking in a camp kitchen, but possibly to give the regular cook a complete break) told her that they could start again at 3:30. At 3:27, she declared it close enough to start and so they did.

At 5:57, the meal was ready. Wine glasses were filled with pomegranate frizzante, garnished with lime slices. Our plates had the beet puree, beside pesto zucchini and zucchini fries. It was delicious. Last night's chef commented that the beet puree had little connection to the zucchinis. Tomorrow's chef remarked that he had eaten a lot of snacks (burgers, chicken fingers, chips, pop, other chicken) at a friend's house in the afternoon. I had missed lunch so I licked my plate clean.

The second course had a beautiful mound of jasmine rice at the centre, draped with roasted onions and peppers. Beside it were half-moons of pickled beets and slices of chicken breast. Again, no complaints from me. This time, no complaints from anyone. The dog showed a great deal of interest in this course, and was later allowed to lick the plate that had held slices of chicken before serving.

Dessert was the feature of this meal, though. The chef had outdone herself here. She had caramelized the baby bananas (lady finger bananas they were called on the menu we received), and fanned them out beside the maple cupcakes, and then dolloped coffee-infused whipped cream (which was actually NutriWhip = no dairy) over the whole thing. Yum, yum, yum. I could imagine the dessert in a real restaurant.

We voted and gave feedback. We washed dishes. We were warned that tomorrow's meal had not been planned. Possibly the stiffest competition was behind us. Or maybe not. We would go for a long walk with the dog to work off the delicious calories and we would wonder what was ahead on the final installment of our Chopped competition.

Round One

2012-01-03T23:28:00.004-05:00

Have you ever run into one of those television marathons -- non-stop episodes of Laverne and Shirley or Seinfeld? On New Years Day, we were pooped and so were sucked into the vortex of a marathon viewing of the tv show Chopped.

For the uninitiated, let me explain how Chopped works: four contestants are each given a basket of mystery ingredients, access to a well-stocked kitchen, and 20 minutes to make an appetizer. One of the shows we watched the other day asked the contestants to use Korean short ribs, gefelte fish, lemon thyme and zucchini to make their appetizers. When the clock runs out, the food is served to professional chefs who are really exacting judges. One contestant is eliminated -- or chopped -- before the entree round, and then another before the dessert round. After dessert, the Chopped Chef Champion is crowned.

The show gave Dave a brilliant idea: we would provide each child with a basket of ingredients at the beginning of the day and they would be required to serve us a three-course meal. They could start as early as they liked -- our only time requirement was that they had to be prepared to plate (see, I paid attention to the lingo!) by 6:00 p.m. sharp. Judging would follow -- with results released after Thursday's meal. Everyone but the chef was allowed to vote in three categories: Taste, Presentation and Creativity. Parents' votes counted for double the points.

We drew lots to see who would go first. There was exchange of cash for switching of positions (first place cost $1.25, I believe).

Our first chef rose earlier than he has all holiday. He is the child who has attended chef camp three times now and is an accomplished cook. He was given as his list of ingredients: delicata squash, snow peas and Asian pears. At the last minute, we added coconut to the list of required ingredients.

In late morning, our chef and his dad went shopping: leeks were required for his plan. By noon, he was on the job. Great smells wafted up to me where I was working, and I was called down for consultation about how to cut the squash.

The first course was a vichyssoise -- a cold potato leek soup -- garnished with a puree of squash, roasted with ginger and brown sugar, and snow peas. Let me say that I've never seen a squash roasted to such caramel perfection. I begged a taste from the chef and my mouth was dazzled. At the meal itself, the soup was delicious, seasoned to perfection, with the puree and the peas offering a surprisingly fresh counterpoint to the creaminess of the soup. The soup was a bit chunky -- which led me to ask the chef why he had chosen this, him to explain that he didn't want it to be just a big liquidy soup like a bowl of vomit, and his siblings to discuss the actual chunky texture of vomit. But, remember the part about the caramel perfection. Yes, let's focus on the caramel perfection.

The second course was handmade pasta with a deliciously light tomato-beef sauce. The sauce apparently was lightened by the addition of chicken stock. The pasta was quite heavy, though well-cooked. It turned out that our pasta maker was also temperamental today, so the pasta had been rolled and cut by hand. It was more than edible. Our only complaint was portion size: we wanted more. This raised the issue of eel: on one episode of Chopped, the chefs had been given eel to deal with and several of them had offered far, far too much snaky eel as part of their entrees. Light tomato sauce, light tomato sauce.

Dessert followed and explained the buttery smells that had permeated the house all afternoon. The chef had caramelized butter and maple syrup with slices of Asian pears, and then had covered the fruit with a layer of buttery pastry to make a Tarte Tatin. He cut this into wedges and served it with lightly-sweetened fresh whipped cream and toasted coconut. We had learned from the Chopped judges to look for a variety of textures and an interplay of tastes and this course delivered. So much so that there were no gory allusions made throughout this course. Instead there was moaning and applause.

As we drained our glasses of blood orange frizzante, garnished with slices of blood orange, we gave our feedback to the chef and then wrote our judgments on individual pieces of paper, which were then collected and put into safekeeping.

Tonight's chef had tired legs after an afternoon in the kitchen, but he was satisfied. As his sister prepared her menus and checked on her marinating pickled beets in the fridge, though, he had to wonder: Would It Be Enough?

MYOB

2012-01-03T17:43:00.003-05:00

It's Taylor Swift I keep thinking about, Taylor Swift who apparently eulogizes all her past boyfriends in song. I'm wondering what Taylor doesn't write about.

There are many many things I won't write about -- my own stuff and other people's. I am very aware that the Internet is a public and permanent forum -- that what happens on Facebook doesn't stay on Facebook.

And yet, when the issue of privacy in terms of blogging and writing arose most recently, I wondered whether or not I've drawn the boundaries tightly enough, whether the people in my life are safe from me using them as material. And at the same time, whether I am free as a writer needs to be to write about what I know, what I've experienced.

I know of several mommybloggers who have opted to be increasingly limited in what they say about their kids as the kids get old enough to be aware of what their parents are doing. Essentially the fact is that Mom has chosen to blog; the kids haven't chosen to be blogged about.

And likewise, I have at least more choice about what I write about. I've just finished an eight-year run writing about Quebec, and I have a new place in my sights. Is it safe to invite me anywhere? And yet, there are many places I've loved that have not inspired writing.

In my questions of the last week, I did some online research to see whether there were rules that I had missed, rules that would protect the people and places I love from being captured and displayed by yours truly. Apparently it's taboo to write about someone else's sexual orientation, religion, political views and personal habits without their permission. To which I say, duh. I suppose blogs and social media can be used in nasty ways, but those lines seem a little too clear. The real issues arise, as a friend I talked to said, much sooner than this, and are much fuzzier.

Can stories that would be totally fine at a cocktail party be told online to a wider audience? Do some people have proprietary rights to places or events? Do a writer's motives matter? Does it matter whether such stories are told in a favourable light or not? Or, is it safest never to mention anyone else at all? (Also, how is that ever possible?)

None of these are theoretical issues for me, but very real questions.

There are pieces I have written that will never be published; pieces that may never be published; occasionally there are short pieces in my mind that are erased once the emotions subside that will never even be written down.

Relationships matter. But so does truth telling and story telling. I called this blog entry MYOB (I just realized that MYOB is an acronym that preceded texting) but here's the thing: what if having a writer in your life means that sometimes your business is my business?
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Anticipation

2012-01-01T09:14:00.005-05:00

I am not hung over but I awoke this first day in 2012 in a funk, physically and emotionally. I'm weary after several long. long days of parties, and short caffeine-fueled nights. I'm disgruntled because the way I like to end a year, the way I almost always end a year is contemplatively. I put away the Christmas ornaments (I know, Eric. There are six more days of Christmas still to come.) I clean the house and I ponder. Not this year. This year, I baked and laughed and drove and cooked and bustled about. It wasn't bad, but this morning, I feel utterly unprepared for A Fresh Start, although quite in need of one.

The problem is that I decided a couple of weeks ago on my word for 2012: anticipation.

I've already been scratched by the dog, whose anticipation for a walk preceded Dave getting out of the shower. I'm sitting at the computer, unshowered with a wee sore throat and distaste for the mess around me, when the still, small voice pops into my head: How can you best move into a posture of anticipation from here?

A good question.

Wikipedia tells me that anticipation is "an emotion involving pleasure, excitement, and sometimes anxiety in considering some expected or longed-for good event. Anticipation is the process of imaginative speculation about the future."

I'm good at the imaginative speculation part -- it's the expectation of a longed-for good event. That's the part that requires a stretch. The truth is that, as much as I wish it weren't so, too often I live in ways that say I fear the future. That's what I want to shed this year -- frankly, to turn away from, to repent, this year.

Interestingly, Wikipedia goes on to quote psychiatrist George Eman Vaillant who said anticipation was one of "the mature ways of dealing with real stress... You reduce the stress of some difficult challenge by anticipating what it will be like and preparing for how you are going to deal with it." He adds that tThere is evidence that "the use of mature defenses (sublimation, anticipation) tended to increase with age."

I like that anticipation isn't just a blind blithe approach to life, but one that prepares well. I like that the aging process enhances this function.

Let me say that I'm not naturally a pessimist. What I tend to do -- too much -- however, is to see my life as a to-do list, a series of problems to be solved -- often in a smaller period of time than I'd like.

And here's the heart of it. To quote the wiki once more, "To enjoy one's life, 'one needs a belief in Time as a promising medium to do things in; one needs to be able to suffer the pains and pleasures of anticipation and deferral.'" To believe there is enough time is important. To believe that Time is a good medium is another. But to believe that Time is a promising medium to me requires a belief in something -- or someone -- outside time. For years I've worn a bracelet with my favourite quotation on it: All shall be well. It's part of a longer quotation from medieval mystic Julian of Norwich who, in the midst of what looked like a fatal illness, had a series of divine revelations, among which were the insight that despite the sin and suffering of the world, the weight and heaviness that is so real, all would be made well. I don't remember the exact quote but it says that all SHALL be well, and all WILL be well, and all MAY be well and every kind of thing will BE well.

I want this quote to be more than a sentiment on a bracelet, but a new way to be in the world as I enter 2012. With anticipation.

Making Merry

2011-12-30T22:50:00.004-05:00

"I don't myself make merry at Christmas."
- Ebenezer Scrooge

"You can't be merry by yourself. Sure, you can be content, happy, possibly even delirious. But merriment requires a group, and that group is almost always a group you can see and touch, one that's sharing the same molecules of air, face to face. The digital revolution continues to get deeper, wider and more important. But it has made no progress at all at increasing merriment. That's up to us."
- Seth Godin

I have two favourite Christmas movies. One is utterly silly and the other has Muppets.

The first is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation; the second is The Muppets' Christmas Carol. The first movie resonates with my traditions: when we brought home a wrapped IKEA Christmas tree this year and prepared to cut the cords that bound it, I called my husband Sparky and prepared for the windows to be blown out. The second movie resonates with my heart: Michael Caine plays Scrooge straight, despite the fact that his fellow thespians are largely puppets.

Both films are stories of second chances, I suppose, but they're also both stories about learning to appreciate the people around you, whether it's Cousin Eddie or Bob Cratchit.

One of the things I have most appreciated this holiday season has been the opportunity to make merry with groups of people. We have hosted more events than usual and have attended a number of parties with friends and family.

Maybe it's because I'm working from home mostly. Maybe it's because this year was not the easiest or nicest. All I know is that I've been so happy to make merry with others, so thankful for the gifts of people in my life.

For most of my life, Christmas has been a challenge for me mostly because I want to make it perfect, want to savour every moment, want to find the elusive balance between spirit and shopping mall.

What I want to pack away with the ornaments so that I can pull it out next year and every year is this: no Christmas is perfect, no balance is ever struck, no one can be so mindful as to attend to every moment.

Nor is this necessary.

What is necessary is the giving and receiving of hospitality - not necessarily in terms of food and drink, although those are really good too -- but in terms of welcoming one another, remembering one another. It's about doing the best we can to celebrate together, to make surprises for one another, to create good memories together. It's about making merry -- something we really can't do alone or even virtually.

I think of the first Christmas, which was probably not a silent night. In my imagination, the innkeeper who found a place for the holy family has a wife who cannot sleep for the sounds of the young girl in labour and who comes and lets her hand be wrung by Mary, and who washes the baby, calms the father, finds a bite of food for an exhausted new mother. Shepherds and angels come too, and animals surround them with their soft sounds and comforting smells. And later, the kings bearing tributes that point us now to gift giving.

Maybe these lessons shouldn't be packed away, but instead tied to the doorposts. Scrooge said, "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." What I take from that tonight -- my stomach and heart full after a good, good night with dear friends -- is that we don't live our lives alone: we are surrounded by people to whom we can extend and receive hospitality on any occasion, even if that hospitality is only, or especially, that of a listening ear, a presence.

And together, as not alone, we can be merry.

Small Joys

2011-12-25T19:31:00.003-05:00

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”
― Pearl S. Buck

A friend asked me the other day what the big gifts at our house were going to be. Honestly, I was stumped. I couldn't remember a single one. We have occasionally gone in for big gifts but today, as so often, was about small joys.

My crafty engineer daughter who knew that I wanted an angel to add to the choir I keep on the piano at Christmas made me one, with wings of washers and a skirt made of a knob wrapped in blue felt. It's just lovely and ingenious.

Last night, our dog jumping for scraps of drifting tissue paper.

Our technical son bought a domain name and host for my husband, and will create a website to order.

Our eldest squirreled away my gift since midsummer -- a tiny but deeply precious glass-and-metal cube of a necklace charm.

I gave my husband the gift of Tuesdays - knowing that what he needs most of all these days is quiet time to himself.

Tongue tattoos, fair trade chocolate, bath bomb, Justin Bieber stickers, Sting's 25th anniversary CD, great secondhand books, an elusive calendar, a funky mousepad, honey sticks and maple leaves, more books, an Aragorn action figure (My precioussssss....).

Our day unfolded with small joyful moments too. For the first time in recorded family history, neither extended family opted to celebrate today. Some of us stayed in pyjamas all day. Some wore new clothes. Most of us climbed back into bed at some point to read. There were waffles with raspberries. There were walks with the puppy. There was a leisurely preparing of a full turkey dinner. There was a midafternoon craft session where we made a small spare Christmas tree out of branches we've picked up while walking the dog on the golf course.

Dave initiated that last one, and did most of the picking of sticks himself. He said today that it had reminded him of gathering sea glass on the beach, that steady attention.

And that really was what today was all about -- finding small and precious treasures together. That was the big gift at our house today.

Sparkle and Glow

2011-12-23T17:48:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was my first real day off. I had a party this morning so I things to do to get ready, but I had stayed up until the wee smalls finishing off all the work I needed to do in 2011. The problem was that my body could barely believe that I was really allowed to stop, to rest. My fear was that I had forgotten how.

I had one small idea in mind that might put me in the Christmas spirit. At church on Sunday, one of the coolest girls I know had hair-thin tinsel glistening in her hair. Her mom told me where they had had it done, that it was inexpensive. It occurred to me that if I wanted to go gray, I could test out a few sparkly silver threads.

I called the hair salon at noon. They had one small opening at 12:45. It was warm and dry so I hopped on my bike and drove across town. We talked tattoos and teachers while the stylist tied elaborate knots of silver in my hair. By the time she was done, I felt all festive.

I decided to ride to Joseph Schneider Haus which was close at hand. I tend to go there before Christmas each year to at least feast my eyes on the lovely, homely gifts in the pioneer homestead.

This I did but then I ventured into the rooms near the shop and was captivated for an hour. This year's Artist in Residence has been bookmaker Marlene Pomeroy. Pomeroy has set up a fabulous one-room exhibit that takes the museum-goer through the history of bookbinding and making, the history of local printing and binding, and her own love affair with Italy and Michelangelo. I described the installation in the guestbook as exquisite, and it certainly was. I copied down quotes and ideas throughout the room. The entire experience was meditative and wonderful.

The exhibit is only open until tomorrow, sadly. On the chance you won't have a chance to attend it (and if it's an option, I'd really encourage you to do so), I wanted to share a taste of it. One of the pieces Marlene had made was an inscribed clay tablet hanging on the wall. She called it, I believe, Thee Commandments, and subtitled it the Bookbinders Code of Conduct. But though I am not a bookbinder, the lessons spoke deeply to me. I thought I'd share them with you.

Bookbinders' Code of Conduct

I. If you meet resistance -- why
II. Better a good mend than a bad match
III. Take a break
IV. Think twice - do once
V. Make mistakes - no one dies
VI. Build release layers
VII. Charge what you are worth
VIII. Find a mentor
IX. Ask questions
X. Work with joy

As I lean into the holidays -- the holy days -- these unexpected lessons feel like the gift of a map. My hope is to practice the third and sixth commandments in the next few weeks, and then to return to work -- to launch my new business - with joy.

I wish you the same -- and would love to hear your responses to this wise list.

Christmas 2011

2011-12-21T12:00:00.001-05:00

Two years ago, our Christmas letter felt almost embarrassing. (It had been a great year.) 2011 has also been an unusual year.

In January, Dave got a call from the Perimeter Institute, the physics think-tank he’s worked with for years, asking him to join them fulltime for a semester starting in February. An administrative glitch at his school meant this came together surprisingly easily. Megan and I enjoyed a few days of fresh oranges and shopping with my sister and my parents in Florida.
Possibly the most significant spiritual moment of 2011 for me happened in late January when I was on my annual retreat weekend. My agenda was to figure out what my next vocational step would be. I got up early to walk the labyrinth. It was covered with snow but I decided to walk it by feel. Halfway around, I realized I was out of the maze altogether. I had a clear, freeing sense of God saying, “This is not the season – you can’t know yet.”

In hindsight, I’m glad I couldn’t see ahead. Because the next few months were a blur, a bad dream of significant illness, a run of bad luck and crisis in our family and extended family. And then, as the smoke cleared in May, we adopted a puppy. We had considered a number of elaborate names – our cats had been Eucharistia and Eleuthera – but when we met our sweet, goofy black and white lab-springer spaniel cross, Matt took one look at him and said, “His name is Lucky.”

I’ve thought a lot this year about the concept of luck. What does it mean to be lucky? What does it mean when a heap of horrendousness piles into your life? And really, where is God in the middle of what looks like bad luck? (Or good luck, for that matter?) There have been times this year when it would have been too much of a stretch to say we felt lucky. But we’ve also learned that what we see as bad may not always be, and what we hope for may not be what we need. And oftentimes the blessing we experience is an unexpected one.

I’ve been reading a great book – One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. Her premise is that when we practice gratitude, in small things and hard-to-be-thankful things, we learn the goodness of God in all situations. I’m learning to pay attention to the blessings around me, even in the midst of what sometimes threatened to be an annus horriblis, as the Queen would say.

There have been many things that have not been hard to be thankful for: two graduating boys (John from grade 6 – with a citizenship award, and Matt from grade 8); a 20th anniversary stay at the Muskoka resort at which we spent our honeymoon; Megan returning to piano lessons with delight; Dave’s opportunities to travel to Switzerland and Winnipeg, as well as the extension of his PI sojourn; all three kids having deeply meaningful camp experiences, thanks to Grandma and Grandpa Fish; a lovely few days hiking in the Finger Lakes of New York with our puppy; three kids playing rep or select level soccer and two boys playing on their school football teams; and, new work direction for me at last (see storywell.ca for details).

Advent is a season of “you can’t know yet”, a time of waiting and hoping where perhaps the best preparation is the confession that we are a people walking in darkness, waiting for great light. The great good news of Advent is that “when the time was right, God sent his Son” and that God meets us in our own particular time and place and need, if we will only wait.

This Christmas, may you experience God’s light in every corner of your life and may you know gratitude.

Much love,

Dave, Susan, Matt, John, Megan & Lucky

Dear Peter Kent

2011-12-17T17:48:00.014-05:00

Dear Minister,

I was two years old when Trudeau swore in Parliament. Pierre Trudeau. A few years later, in my grade 3 class, we had daily current events where a class member would listen to the news or read the newspaper to acquaint ourselves with issues of public importance. At school, we had a large wooden television case, with the television removed. The current events person of the day would sit inside the box and report on the news. I remember once, when it was my turn, quoting a politician -- maybe even Trudeau -- when he used strong language, and getting away with it because it was a quote about something important.

Fastforward few more years to the early 1980s when you yourself used strong language -- not profanity -- to warn us about the dangers of global warming and climate change. I was in high school then, already scared to death by movies like The Day After. But climate change was something we could do something about.

Or so you said.

So now, here we are in 2011. You go off to South Africa -- without giving permission for opposition party members to join the Canadian delegation (Elizabeth May got permission from Papua New Guinea, for heaven's sake!) -- and break our promises. And then another Trudeau swore.

My own kids -- who range from grade five to nine - sat at the dinner table the other day and imagined, not current events, but future history classes when this historical moment is described. You know you'll get a footnote, of course--as the minister responsible for the first ever ratified treaty broken by Canada. You know too that comments like Archbishop Tutu's will be attached to your posterity: "Canada, you were once considered a leader on global issues like human rights and environmental protection. Today, you're home to polluting tar sands oil, speeding the dangerous effects of climate change." You know that you listened as a 17-year old delegate spoke at the conference: “I speak for more than half the world’s population,” declared Anjali Appadurai of Maine’s College of the Atlantic. “We are the silent majority. You’ve given us a seat in this hall, but our interests are not at the table. What does it take to get a stake in this game? Lobbyists? Corporate influence? Money? You have been negotiating all of my life. In that time, you’ve failed to meet pledges, you’ve missed targets, and you’ve broken promises.”

You know, that's not how I'd like to be remembered. It's not how Canada wishes to be known or remembered.

The alternative is not merely pie-in-the-sky. There are good, practical, creative, economically viable alternatives to fiddling while tar sands burn. In Calgarian writer Chris Turner's new book The Leap, he agrees with you and many others that Kyoto is not the most practical of solutions -- but, he says if delegates to the Copenhagen conference had stepped outside the conference hall, they would have seen innovative, green solutions that build community and profit.

(Hint: Do something that is innovative, green, community-building and profitable and not only will you get re-elected, you'll be able to sleep at night.)

As for me, I'm riding my bike instead of driving. I'm turning off lights, buying energy efficient appliances, shoveling my driveway, hanging my clothes to dry, constantly looking for ways to reduce my carbon footprint.

Frankly I don't even care to debate whether this helps lower the world's mean temperatures or gives us a white Christmas and coastal cities a fighting chance. What I'm doing can't hurt and very well might help.

I'd like to suggest you take that approach in your legislation and your treaties. I'd like to see Canada restored to its former role as an admirable world leader. I'd like to have my grandchildren be able to see snow someday.

It's a really busy time of the year. Maybe the hope is that we'll be too busy with our shopping and cooking to say this kind of consumption must stop.

You know what? I am that busy -- and I'm still making time to send you this note. Because it matters that much. I'm not going to swear, but I still hope my voice, my passion and my fury will be heard.

Maybe Kyoto targets were unreachable -- someone said the original plans to meet targets had 'other reductions' listed as the main ways of reducing emissions and likened it to a miscellaneous spending category on a family budget exceeding the mortgage payments. Fine. That doesn't mean we have license to wait until 2015. The time to act is now.

I think of the visitations of the spirits upon Ebenezer Scrooge -- the past, the present and the future. How will you be visited this Christmas? I imagine your own 1984 broadcast as your Ghost of Christmas Past -- the one that shows you your youthful idealism. I see Bishop Tutu as your Ghost of Christmas Present -- the one who shows you the true state of things. But, the third ghost is the one who frightens Scrooge, the one who foretells the doom of Tiny Tim and the unmourned death of Scrooge himself. It is to the third ghost that Scrooge asks -- Are these things that will be or things that may be? Your Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Minister, is Anjali Appadurai, my children and yours -- those for whom climate change is a life and death issue.

Now is the time to act. Throw open the shutters. Buy the biggest turkey you can find -- so to speak -- and send it to Tiny Tim that he may be well. Dream dreams. Find solutions. Put them in place. Ride your bike. Take the bus. Skype your meetings. Change. The. World.

And then, this Christmas, with grateful hearts, we will say "God bless us, every one."

Grey-Haired Girl

2011-12-13T11:55:00.004-05:00

Because I know you're breathless to follow my grey journey, here's the update.

Today was the day I had scheduled for a haircut and silver streaks to be added to my hair. The person I spoke to on the phone at my usual salon said, "Oh yeah, we do that kind of thing all the time" and said I should plan to be there for two hours. I hoped I wouldn't have an allergic reaction to the peroxide -- it would be ironic to react only as I stopped dyeing.

I arrived and was suited up in several layers of plastic before my stylist arrived. My hairstylist is a very short, Vietnamese woman in her fifties who cuts hair like a dream and swears like a sailor. She watches The Bachelorette and is a devoted grandmother. She is also a collaborator with me on my hair plans.

Not so much today.

Today, she shook her head and told me she would do whatever I said, but she said it in a tone of voice that suggested I was insane. And then she said no, she wouldn't actually do it. She said she had clients who got grey streaks and then went to Shopper's Drug Mart -- "It's always Shopper's Drug Mart," she said -- and were asked if they wanted the discount for Seniors' Day. "They always dye their hair back," she said. She also made the argument that my hair might fall out from the damage of stripping the dark colour out. She pointed out that I was really tall, that few people could even see the top of my head, that the back and sides were barely grey at all.

We talked haircuts then. Could I get it all chopped off or would I look like a potato? We compromised with a non-potatohead short cut, no dye job, and she began to snip.

As she cut, I mentioned the people who had died of toxic, accumulated dark hair dye. She shrugged and said that cancer was also a strong possibility.

She asked what my mom thought of my idea to stop dyeing my hair. I said my mom still dyes her hair and now so do both my sisters while my brother is quite salt and pepper at 31.

As I paid, I asked her whether she thought I would cave in and dye it dark. Again, she shrugged.

I stopped in at my husband's office afterwards to show him my hair and to get a cup of coffee. He was working on something with a colleague, a guy I have also worked with. "Hey, no colour," Dave said. I turned to Richard, "I'm going grey," I said. "Me too," Richard replied. "No, I said. "I mean, I was planning to get grey added to my hair today." I told the Shoppers Drug Mart story.

I don't want to get carded, so to speak, at Shoppers Drug Mart. I don't want to be mistaken for my children's grandmother. I don't want to look ugly. But, why is it, I thought that Richard, who is younger than me and who has probably the same amount of grey as I do, is relaxed about his hair colour, and that the world is too? Would Richard be offered the seniors' discount? Probably not.

I know there's almost certainly a grey hair-female fertility connection going on here. That's the subtext of the fact that the vast majority of women dye their hair. But, I'm okay with the fact that I'm done birthing babies. (I would accept a three year old, mind you. I love those guys.)

What I'm not okay with is any assumption of loss of creativity or relevance, with the idea that grey hair = rocking chair.

With today's haircut, a greater percentage of my hair is now greyer, even without a bottle. I think growing the grey out will be significantly more annoying than growing bangs out. And maybe I will cave in rather than accept fraudulent discounts at chain drugstores. But, for now, it feels like a step of authenticity.

And that's the silver lining.

it's the little things

2011-12-10T17:57:00.005-05:00

Four appliances broke this week, more or less. Well, three did and we decided to get a four for one deal -- getting the oven door repaired by the same repairman who came to fix the clunk in our dryer. The ba-dunk, ba-dunk, ba-dunk of our dryer. We left the two faulty laptops for next week.

Friday morning, the repairmen arrived to fix the appliances an hour early. An hour before that, I had a call from my printer who was doing a last-minute rush job for me to come see the proofs. And it was a good thing I did. I needed to call my designer and wait for the changes and then a new proof. I had two wilted kids home from school -- and Wilted Kid #1 phoned me at the print shop to say that the repairmen had called to say they were on their way. We finished up our business and I raced across town to drop things to a friend who was moving this weekend. Sitting in her living room, Wilted Kid #2 phoned to say the repair truck had pulled up. I flew into motion and was home five minutes later. Reapir guy already had the top off my dryer -- "I just noticed," he said. "That you wanted an hour's notice. And I'm running really early today anyhow -- I had a cancellation."

Ten minutes later, he came to me with a small piece of metal in his hand -- the bottom piece of a metal zipper had somehow gotten into the works of the dryer. Fifteen minutes after that, he opened the faulty door of my oven and gave me the opportunity to clean off the insides of the window before he put the pieces back together again. Apparently this piece was open-able, though we had never figured out how and had resigned ourselves to having a filthy-looking glass door. Or, as I sometimes liked to think of it, a well-used glass door. He sat on his haunches on my kitchen floor while I scrubbed and scraped and generally felt like the World's Worst Housekeeper. He told me he had taken sick days the two previous days -- his first in forever -- while my wilted children ran past, miraculously revived. I felt like the World's Worst Mother.

Two hundred dollars later, he left the house. I had two now-working appliances and I should have been happy. Instead, I looked at the tiny piece of metal that had occasioned his visit, and thought about the tiny piece of metal -- a screw -- that was needed inside my oven door. Together, they might be the size of my baby fingernail.

It made me think about how little things make all the difference -- for good and for bad. A smile, a dash of cinnamon, exact change. A scowl, too much cinnamon, being five cents short.

Tomorrow is haircut and get-streaked-with-gray day. It really should be a little thing, but it feels rather huge. It reminds me of a sign we pass on our route from Waterloo to Lake Huron: the sign notes the head of the watershed: water on one side flows one way, and on the other, flows opposite. The sign is not on any apparent hill. It appears to be on flat ground. It's a little thing and yet it makes all the difference.

Best Books of 2011

2011-12-07T18:33:00.004-05:00

I may have mentioned before that one of my best gigs is writing book reviews for our local paper. I love it and take my responsibility -- to reader and writer - really seriously.

Today I had the opportunity to correspond electronically back and forth with one of the authors whose books I most enjoyed this year, and it made me want to spread the word about her books even farther and wider.

And so, with the thought that many of us are doing holiday shopping these days, I thought I'd offer a list of the best books I read this year. Please note that the longer reviews are ones that I wrote for my newspaper reviews, and that there were many other books that could have made this list.

1. Museum of Thieves by Lian Tanner
When my children were small, I read chapters of great books aloud to them each night. We slowly made our way through classic books and newfound treasures. As they got older, sports and homework began to dominate our evenings and we decided we would read aloud mainly in the summertime. This spring, I picked up Museum of Thieves, read it and announced to my children that homework could wait - we would be reading this one aloud.

Museum of Thieves is a unique book in so many ways. It is a kind of dystopian fiction for children, to start with. In the book’s world, children are the most precious of commodities and must be kept safe from a wide variety of dangers – including dirty water, scrapes and possibly extinct creatures. The characters allude to a time when all the dangers of their town, Jewel, were contained. After this time, children were kept chained at the wrist to Blessed Guardians by day and parents by night until they are 12. On Goldie Roth’s Separation Day, the unthinkable happens: a child is murdered. The Separation ceremony is cancelled but Goldie, prompted by an inner voice that never leads her wrong and the appearance of a mysterious man, escapes. By the next morning, she has found her way to safety in the town’s Museum.

The Museum, as the title suggests, is a major character in the novel, but it is no less memorable than its Keepers who teach Goldie, “The people of Jewel treat their children like delicate flowers. They think they will not survive without constant protection. Bu there are parts of the world where young boys and girls spend weeks at a time with no company except a herd of goats...And so, when hard times come – as they always do in the end – those children are resourceful and brave.” Goldie learns that a certain amount of wildness is not only necessary, but desirable. When disaster does befall the town, Goldie is ready.

One reviewer of this book took objection to the fact that the people of Jewel worship a wide variety of gods and that the Blessed Guardians who are condemned sound like conservative Christians. I think this reviewer fails to see a few things: first, the gods are completely powerless and foolish, and secondly, what is criticized here is not conservatism – the good guys are museum keepers and the city’s leader – but those who prevent any progress, those who believe that there is no room for freedom and bravery and wildness. If the church loses those virtues, it should indeed be criticized. But here, no critique of a particular institution is intended.

This book delighted my kids as well as me, and brought me to tears more than once, thanks to the spirit of its characters. The book stands alone well, but, happily for readers, will have at least one sequel, published later this year.

2. One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp
This book is a rare thing: a lyrical, brutally honest, deeply theological meditation. To summarize it thematically would reduce what it is, but Voskamp -- who is a local author -- tells how a small, simple practice entirely changed her life. I am buying several copies of this book to give at Christmas.

3. The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
I could not put this book down – it knocked my socks off. If it were up to me, I would put this book on Canadian high school English curriculum, along with Robertson Davies and W.O. Mitchell. Of course, the book would be taken off the curriculum for the excessive amounts of profanity it contains, but that would be a shame, because this is a masterfully told tale, by a narrator who, frankly, needs to swear. At times this book reminded me a bit of The Catcher in the Rye or even a bit of The Great Gatsby or Fifth Business, but it is also clearly its own self with an intense and sympathetic narrative voice. The story is told in a series of unrequited emails from a middle-aged man to his college friend who has written a loosely-veiled novel about the real life of the narrator. The series of letters create a powerful layering experience through which truths are gradually revealed and re-revealed, with new nuances added by reflection over time. I have not yet read a novel that integrates electronic communication and social media so deeply and well into its narrative – here, this is done as part of the writer’s (and narrator’s) exploration into identity, how we are known, the stories we tell and the roles we play within stories. This is an extraordinarily powerful novel by an author previously unknown to me – I will certainly be picking up her other books.

4. Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor
The last time I read a novel plastered with extremely high praise, I have to admit I was disappointed. The author in that case was no 21st century Jane Austen. Ghost Light, by Irish author Joseph O’Connor, is tattooed with the most laudatory comments, but I’m not sure they even begin to scratch the surface. This was a remarkable book. I have little to compare it to.

As a writer, I wondered what state I would have to get into in order to be able to write with the subtle, exquisite lyricism O’Connor uses throughout. This is a book written by someone who adores and has fully and utterly mastered the English language, but also by someone who adores and lovingly observes every bit of the world around him.

O’Connor takes for his premise the fact that the real-life playwright John Synge died prematurely of Hodgkin’s disease, leaving behind a fiancée, Molly Allgood, an actress from a lower class of society. However, as O’Connor writes in his Acknowledgements at the end of the book, this is a work of fiction where the author “takes immense liberties with facts”, including character and plot.

The novel is told largely in the second person, which is unusual in itself. The “you” who is addressed is Molly, now an old woman as she lives in near starvation and alcoholism, but at the same time recalls beautiful and vivid moments from her past, particularly her affair with Synge.

The most beautiful scene in the book – a month’s idyll spent at a cottage – stands in sharp contrast to the perceptions of Molly as an old drunk, and reminds readers of the possible past lives of any person they might meet.

The title is only revealed near the end with the explanation that a light is traditionally left burning in a theatre so the ghosts can perform their own plays. Synge’s shaping influence in Molly’s life, before and after his death, make him a significant presence in the novel.

Any reader who appreciates a well-told, well-crafted story will be sure to delight in this book.

5. A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny

A Trick of the Light is the seventh book in the series, set in fictional Three Pines, a small Quebecois village, with a familiar cast of characters. Penny’s books are nothing if not character-driven and her legion of fans flock to these books to see what happens next to these beloved people. While not quite as strong as her last book, readers will not be disappointed.

A Trick of the Light is brilliantly plotted and is also possibly one of Penny’s most personal of novels, dealing as it does with alcoholism, its roots and consequences, as well as the experiences of success and rejection in the artistic realm. I waffled back and forth between delight at genuine insights into these difficult places and an occasional sense that the book was a vehicle for the author’s experiences.

Still, I was kept guessing at the murderer’s identity until nearly the end, and I both chuckled out loud and got tears in my eyes as I read. Also, as always, I appreciated Penny’s deep insights into human motivations and – perhaps more than in any previous book-- the way she weaves the interplay of light and dark in both art and human nature together with tremendous insight into both. I also like the way Penny connects books together – not everything is wrapped up by the end.

One of my biggest beefs with the book was its timeline and the sheer number of events and personal developments that took place over such a very short period of time – if I were one of the characters, I think I’d be exhausted, but it also seemed too quick to have a ritual smudging to get rid of bad spirits the very day that the body was found. I was struck, too, by the amount of profanity in this book: many of Penny’s witty, distinctive characters have always had salty language, but in this book, it seemed that the profanity had gone up a few notches, including times that seemed arbitrary. I also found at least one scene heavy-handed – a scene of great revelation takes place during a violent thunderstorm, but by the end, the storm has moved on. The reader doesn’t need the pathetic fallacy for the emotional resonance – Penny has created a rich world with memorable characters and leaves the reader eager for the next instalment.

6. Divergent by Veronica Roth
If you thought deciding which house you might belong to at Hogwarts was exciting, wait until you try to decide which life-altering choice the characters in Divergent should make. In a vaguely post-apocalyptic Chicago, people have decided that the root of war is not ideology so much as personality flaws. Society is split into factions which function as parallel tribes, based on which personality problem people believe is at the root of conflict. Those who believe deception are the problem, for instance, live in Candor, while those who believe hate is the issue live in Amity. At the age of sixteen, each child undergoes a chemically-induced aptitude test to determine which faction they are best suited to. The following day, the teens must declare their allegiance, and join their new (or old) faction to complete their education. Divergent begins on the day of the aptitude test and is told from the point of view of Beatrice (or Tris) who has never felt completely at home in her self-denying faction of Abnegation.

I had trouble putting this book down. I read it late into the night and then dreamed about it.

Veronica Roth, the author, sold this book while she was still a university student living in Chicago. Roth creates a terrific and believable world. Like the Harry Potter books, Divergent functions as a kind of boarding school story, but in many ways, it is better likened to The Hunger Games series, in terms of its challenges, violence and political subplots.

Roth does not shy away from instances of violence in this book, and unlike The Hunger Games, the violence is not exactly condemned. Instead Roth sorts out whether the faction solution can actually work and how it leads to a new set of problems.

Roth hooked me with her ability to write about teenage romantic yearnings – and she creates at least one character I could develop a crush on.

Divergent is going to be the first book in a trilogy. While I devoured this book and am eager to read more, I have to say that I didn’t enjoy the last few chapters that set up the next book. Things changed far too quickly and felt like it created a “to be continued” sense of disappointment at the end, rather than having a satisfying feeling of completion. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this book and recommend it highly to teens and adults.

7. The Feast Nearby by Robin Mather
In one unforgettable week in April 2009, Robin Mather’s husband announced he wanted a divorce and the Chicago Tribune, where Mather worked as a food writer, laid her off. Stunned, Mather packed her dog, her parrot and her belongings into her old car and drove to her cottage on a lake in Michigan. The Feast Nearby details the next year of her life, a year devoted to living as well as possible on a meagre freelancing income. Mather’s previous life had afforded her opportunities to eat fabulous meals. She writes, “Those days were gone. Still, eating well had become my habit. I was unwilling to compromise on that matter.”

I have read a wide variety of books about local eating – from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to The 100 Mile Diet. This book is by far my favourite in the genre. I was delighted by so many things about this book. Chiefly, I appreciated Mather’s attitude and sensibility. Rather than being motivated by any kind of agenda, Mather applies commonsense to all the cooking lessons she learned from her mother, a thrifty, seasonal cook, and from her years as a food writer. She buys local food because she wants to support her neighbours and because it is cheapest and often tastiest to buy local food in season.

Mather’s first book, published in 1995, A Garden of Unearthly Delights: Bioengineering and the Future of Food was the first to expose the consequences of genetically-modified foods. Still, she is no purist. She acknowledges that she could not afford to buy all-organic food, and that coffee is a necessity. She also does not skimp on good spices, Parmigiagno-Reggiano cheese and occasional non-local delicacies, but she uses them judiciously. I so appreciated Mather’s non-judgmental attitude: she has carefully thought through her ethics of food and the limitations of her budget and understands that others may make different decisions. The entire locavore movement would do well to embrace such an attitude of thoughtfulness toward both food and people.

I like to think I’m a good cook and I’ve been buying local food and cooking seasonally all my adult life, but again and again, I learned new cooking and preserving tips from Mather, who intersperses short chapters, arranged in seasonal order, with excellent recipes of dishes she has talked about in the preceding chapter. The recipes are all simple and inexpensive – Mather was living on a food budget of $40 per week and could not, for instance, afford to be part of a community-shared agriculture arrangement – but almost all were new and deeply appealing to me. Of the recipes, Mather says they “satisfy[y] the spirit and nurture the body.”

Another aspect of Mather’s book that I appreciated was that this was not a memoir. The only mention of her now-ex-husband after the initial divorce announcements are when Mather realizes she can now take on a free kitten (her husband was allergic) and when she talks about her husband’s fondness for strawberry jam. She does not use this book as an opportunity to look back; instead, she looks forward as she gains in self-sufficiency and strength. I came away from this book wishing I knew her personally and glad she had taught me cookery and personal lessons of living well.

In the last chapter of the book, a friend of Mather’s invites himself and his family to visit Mather. It is a particularly lean season financially but Mather draws from her freezer and shelves a bounty of food and is able to create a feast. She writes of the food she found near her new home, “It provided me with the luxury of having enough to share, even on the spur of the moment, when money was tight and the future uncertain. My life is newly deep and full of riches.” So is this book. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

8. Winterberries and Apple Blossoms by Nan Forler
This book insisted on making my list for two chief reasons: it was responsible for the hands-down best meal I ate in 2011, and Nan workshopped this book in our writers' group. And yet, even if you missed the book launch-ish meal co-sponsored by WordsWorth Books and Nick and Nat's Uptown 21, and even if you didn't watch this book grow, I still recommend it highly to you. The book is comprised of a series of poems that follow a Mennonite girl through a year in which she sits on the fulcrum between childhood and a grown-up world. The book is illustrated by Peter Etril Snyder, Waterloo Region's Mennonite painter, and has as a delicious bonus, a collection of recipes at the end, one corresponding to each month. But it is the delicate, sensitive capturing of that bittersweet time of turning in a girl's life that makes this book so exquisite. As she did with her earlier celebrated book, Bird Child, Nan brings a beautiful and genuine awareness of the emotional life of a child in this book. Winterberries and Apple Blossoms can be savoured by people of all ages -- and ought to be.

9. The Watcher by Sara Davidson
I once asked writer Joseph Boyden what made a novel work. He said that a good novel makes a promise to the reader in the first chapter and fulfills it by the end. On that basis, The Watcher is a very good novel.

I am not always the biggest fan of Christian fiction, even though I firmly share the faith behind many of the novels. The reason for this is two-fold: oftentimes, such stories are message-driven and often, good intentions are stronger than good writing. By contrast, Guelph writer Sara Davison’s debut novel The Watchers is extremely well-written with a suspenseful plot that hooked me from the very first to the very last page.

The greatest strength of this novel is its narrative voice. Davison and her narrator are utterly confident, even masterful. The narrator speaks directly to the reader and his or her identity is not known until the last page. While the story moves back and forth in time over a twenty year period, this is done with tremendous skill, allowing for a slow reveal of a devastating story.

I was reminded at times of the novel that was popular a year or two ago, The Shack in both the subject matter and the themes of grace and forgiveness, but I also saw elements that reminded me of John Bunyan, CS Lewis and more. At the same time, this is a contemporary, Canadian suspense novel with a mystery and a thriller dimension to it.

The Watcher takes place over the span of six days. During this time, both the narrator and the main character, Kathryn, must come to terms with the horrific event that defined her life twenty years before, so that she can finally be free of its effects and move on to a happy future with the man she loves.

I suppose there were a few improbabilities or coincidences to create a perfect storm of tension, but I was able to suspend my disbelief to go along for the ride. The one element that continued to ring a little too-good-to-be-true for me was the intense, ongoing attraction between Kathryn and Nick, the man who has waited for many years to be with her; in real life, I think such sustained and unattained passion would have wilted. I also hoped for a slightly different ending to the novel, but only slightly.

This is a fine first novel and I will be very excited to read more from Sara Davison.

10. Plain Kate by Erin Bow
My writers' group has an embarrassment of riches: not only is Nan Forler in the group but so is Erin Bow. Plain Kate was published in late 2010 but has continued to be recognized throughout 2011, and very deservingly so: Erin won the TD Canadian Children's Book Award this fall for this book. Erin is a poet and it is the language that swirls around in Plain Kate that creates as much a spell as the forms of magic within the plot. And there's an amazing cat. This book does not avoid the dark side of the world but young adult (and adult) readers will savour this book throughout, and will root for this fine heroine.

Snuggle Your Babies

2011-12-06T14:34:00.005-05:00

The worst thing anyone ever did for my theology was when I was told as a small child that Santa Claus was real only as long as you believed in him.

In my family, staying little was valued.

By the time I left for university, my youngest sibling was only six or seven years old so there were always little kids around.

Not so in my own house. From oldest to youngest, my three are three years and eight months apart. They're all big kids now -- teens and preteens. And I love this stage nearly all the time. I love the goofiness, the questions, the energy, the emerging selves that surround me (and threaten to eclipse me in every sense). I do not love the mess and the no-private-time-for-parents and the occasional eye rolling, but I really welcome these older kids with open arms and heart.

But then it comes time to set up the Christmas tree. We have two large boxes of ornaments. Almost every ornament tells a tale. There are the ornaments I choose each year for each child, trying to find something that fits. There are the ornaments we've collected on every trip. But the sweetest ornaments are the ones made by preschool hands -- googly eyes askew, hands traced to form angel wings, copper hammered into heart and star. There are photo ornaments of the impish little faces (and our much younger faces too).

This year, we have a little one in our midst again. He's rolling on the floor beside me as I write. Because of the puppy, we've put our tree up in the family room this year instead of in the living room window. The family room can be closed off from eager paws and energetic tails.

This little one will have his own stocking this year (and, truth be told, a Santa hat with an elastic under his chin. Which will last all of thirty seconds.) But it's not the same as the wonder of a small person.

As I say, I adore having big kids. I don't miss bundling three kids in and out of snowsuits in the winter. (I had to bar the door this morning until the eldest accepted the winter coat I insisted he wear.)

But, at the same time, I want to say to those of you with little ones: savour the moment. Put aside your fatigue and the must-do's once in a while to breathe in the wonder and delight of little people. Sing with them. Make one batch of gingerbread cookies. Plan surprises. Roll snowballs. Go see the lights in the park. Sit on Santa's knee. Tell them the story of the stable and the star. Sit quietly and watch the lights on the tree twinkle. Count down each day of Advent in some way.

And really, the same is the true for our household. Last night, I played piano duets of carols with my daughter and played dress up with her. This moment too and all its sweetness will pass.

Wherever we are, there is something good to be savoured this Christmas. It may take hunting to find it. It may come in the offering rather than in the receiving.

But it's there. Whether we believe in it or not.

Power's Out

2011-12-05T22:12:00.004-05:00

For a decade now, I've gone away on a personal retreat once a year, usually just for 24 hours. Two years ago, they accidentally booked me in for 48 hours so I rationed my food and stayed the whole time. I'm scheduled in for the last weekend in January 2012, but a craving for quiet meant I went this past weekend too.

The place I go to is about a half-hour from home, an old farm homestead that has been converted to a retreat centre. There's wifi only in the conference area. I once went there with a group of friends and one of my closest friends and I decided to walk in a quiet pine forest and some distance out, hearing the crackle of Something Else Out There With Us, we thought of bears and retreated, terrified but laughing at ourselves.

The particular place I stay at is a teeny weeny cottage. It's a former dairy with thick stone walls. The whole thing might be 12 feet wide and 12 feet long. There are two rooms -- with the mini kitchen alongside the pullout bed, and the toilet, desk and shower in the other room. It has everything a person could need.

Except for a few key things this weekend.

The bathroom desk -- which is nicer than it sounds -- is equipped with a desk lamp, a journal (to record observations about one's time at the Hermitage), and a group of candles. I brought a nice soy candle of my own. I did not bring matches, but there are always matches there. Not this time. I searched every nook and cranny -- including under the sink, in pots, in the first aid kit - and there were none. No candles for me. I worked all new-fashioned with the desk lamp and fell asleep, really late.

When I woke up in the morning, I surveyed my hot drink options. Note that I had brought all the options -- and that there were options. I had brought decaf coffee, decaf Earl Grey tea, Creativity rooibus tea, peppermint tea and apple juice. Not one speck of caffeine. Quite accidentally. I made and drank a cup of Earl Grey, hoping to fool my brain.

Then I set out to walk the labyrinth as I often do. The ground, the trees, every blade of grass, every twig and every dried wildflower dazzled with hoarfrost in the early morning light. I walked along one of the paths in the field, and through a little incline and cluster of trees to approach the labyrinth. I spotted a man stepping in, and then another man coming toward me on another path. I decided to wait, and to walk around the trees. I kept my eyes open for the massive wooden cross that stands on a hill, surrounded by a pile of rough field stones. Couldn't see it. The trees must have grown up, I thought. I thought I saw it, then, but it was a telephone pole. Curious, I circled back toward the labyrinth and to the place where the cross stood. There atop the pile of stones was a small stool and a woman sitting on it with a book. In the morning light she looked like a statue, like Rodin's The Thinker.

I sat down on a bench, near the heap, and kept stealing glances up at the woman. I thought it might be a statue. I thought it might be a dream. I felt sick at heart -- more than I would have thought. I kept saying to myself, "There's a lady where the cross should be."

A friend of mine wrote to me after my recent blog post about faith. She suggested that doubt was good -- I agree - and that probably I was living a good moral life, faith or no faith. What I tried to explain to her was that what was missing at times was what felt like a partnership, a relationship -- that all that was left was me. As I looked at the woman sitting in the place where Jesus was, I felt indignant and upset -- but much more than I might ordinarily when I push that relationship, that partnership out to the edges of my life in order to put this lady -- myself -- at the top of the pile.

I wandered somewhat unhappily away. I assumed that this retreat centre had received flack about the cross from other groups that wanted to use the facilities, and so had removed it and left it as a place for contemplation of any stripe. I felt a sense of loss: are any of us strengthened when others' faiths are watered down? I don't think so.

I thought about the three kinds of power I had lost: light/heat; caffeine; the Cross. (Once I came to this centre to write and all four of my pens died. Every year after, I've brought a laptop and a fistful of pens.)

Later in the morning, I walked up to the conference centre kitchen to ask for a book of matches. They had hot water brewing and tea bags, and would not take my money for a cup of tea or the matches. I asked the man working in the kitchen about the cross: it had blown down in a massive windstorm this summer and would be re-erected -- resurrected -- next spring.

In an instant, the power was back on.

It wasn't so much that I actually needed the matches for warmth, the caffeine for wakefulness or a cross on a hill for faith. But their absence jarred me into awareness.

You can't force much on a retreat. You can't get far when you insist on epiphanies; that's precisely when they elude. You can't do the same thing twice -- once I saw a rainbow that cascaded down seemingly onto my wee cottage. You can only get quiet, pay attention and take it in, if and when it comes.

Amazon Women on the Moon

2011-12-01T16:24:00.005-05:00

The Amazon of South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow with an average discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined (not including Madeira and Rio Negro, which are tributuaries of the Amazon). The Amazon, which has the largest drainage basin in the world, about 7,050,000 square kilometres (2,720,000 sq mi), accounts for approximately one-fifth of the world's total river flow*

When I was in university, I held a summer job in the conference centre. One summer, I accidentally became the de facto, temporary conference director when the previous director quit. Another summer, I worked with a wonderful woman who was both elegant and bawdy. We laughed our heads off all the time and got so much done. One of our most absurd moments happened when we called over to another university building, looking for someone, only to be told, "I'm sorry. She's on another floor and cannot communicate." This became our go-to line whenever anything insane happened.

I had a "she's on another floor and cannot communicate" moment this week.

The Amazons are a nation of all-female warriors in Greek mythology and Classical antiquity.*

Actually, moment does not fully describe the two hours I spent on the telephone with various amazon.com and amazon.ca representatives. Though unfailingly polite, they were unable to help me.

Amazon Women on the Moon is a 1987 American satirical comedy film that parodies the experience of watching low-budget movies on late-night television. The film, featuring a large ensemble cast, takes the form of a compilation of twenty-one comedy skits directed by five different directors.*

Let me explain to you -- as I did to all eight Amazon reps -- my own comedy skit. Six years ago, I had a book published. Five years ago, the publisher closed its doors and the book's rights and copies reverted to me. This year, I was encouraged to consider self-publishing and I decided that there was no harm in re-issuing my Christmas-themed book.

No harm except for the hair pulling.

I went to Book Surge, Amazon's alleged self-publishing arm, loaded up my content, filled in all the forms, answered all the questions. It was relatively painless. This was about a month ago. I was sent a sample copy -- and lo, it looked like a real book, was well-bound and printed. I approved the copy, and waited.

And waited.

Yesterday, I decided it was time to find out why the book was not appearing on the site. And to figure out how to adjust the price of the book, which still appears at its (higher) 2005 price on the Canadian website.

This was not as easy as it sounds. It did take eight conversations, two passwords, and one ticket to the IT department in order to find out that someone was on another floor and could not communicate.

To be fair, it's a weird situation. And, if I had posted the book in the first place to amazon, or if this were not a re-issue, I think things would have gone swimmingly.

Or maybe there would have been piranhas in that Amazon story. I don't know.

I'm still on hold, so to speak. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you're interested, I'm selling the book at Waterloo's Ten Thousand Villages store and through Kindred Productions.

Happy start of the Christmas season!

* so saith Wikipedia

First World Problem

2011-12-01T12:22:00.003-05:00

Do you remember the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Great Oz is revealed to be a small, ordinary man operating illusion from behind a curtain?

I feel more than a bit like that with this blog post.

Despite the fact that I have chestnut brown hair, I come from a line of prematurely gray women. The brown is the illusion - created every three weeks with products that are among few chemicals I use. My lawn is drug-free; I use Norwex cloths instead of cleaning products; the most potent drug I take is Advil. And yet, every few weeks, I douse my scalp with hair dye.

I had come to terms with this, as my mom and grandmother did before me.

But two weeks ago, I read an article about a UK woman in a coma after a reaction to hair dye. I only do the recommended skin allergy test the first time I use a new product, and not always then. This story frightened me because apparently the woman had used the same product for years, and the reaction came as a result of an accumulation of the chemicals in her system. She is not expected to live. The chemicals that cause the problem are so toxic they are not permitted in skin products, and are prevalent in dark hair colouring.

Like chestnut.

Five years ago, I let the gray grow in and had gold highlights added too. I wasn't that keen. We look back at the photos now -- and think it was aging.

But, we are all aging. And maybe this is what 42 and a half looks like.

My mother doesn't think this is the best idea. She cites a friend whose return to dyed hair "took ten or fifteen years off her." My reply is that I'd rather hair dye didn't take ten or fifteen years off my life expectancy.

When ethics and aesthetics clash -- I wonder who will win. I wonder too, if I undertake the Brave Gray Experiment and then return to brown, will people treat me differently? Can the Great Oz ever be what he was once he is revealed for who he really is?

These are, as the title indicates, first world problems. I'd rather we all donated our energy and funds to helping the Attiwapiskat community, but as I look at the tinsel on the tree this Christmas, I'm going to be wondering about the beauty of silver streaks.

Two Poems for You

2011-11-30T16:13:00.003-05:00

Truth be told, I'm not much of a poetry girl. It's a shameful admission but there you go. And yet, here are two poems for your delicious enjoyment. The first is one I have been mulling over, one that I think will inform the novel I'm brooding over (and not yet writing, thanks to an excess of paid work). The second appeared today on a friend's Facebook page. Both will Make You Think. I'd be interested in what you think, which you prefer, how you respond.

Ithaca

When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
and the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians,
the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.

Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and corals, amber and ebony,
and pleasurable perfumes of all kinds,
buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.

Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

-K. P. Kavafis (C. P. Cavafy), translation by Rae Dalven

All Heaven is Blazing

All heaven is blazing yet
With the meridian sun:
Make haste, unshadowing sun, make haste to set;
... O lifeless life, have done.
I choose what once I chose;
What once I willed, I will:
Only the heart its own bereavement knows;
O clamorous heart, lie still.

That which I chose, I choose;
That which I willed, I will;
That which I once refused, I still refuse:
O hope deferred, be still.
That which I chose and choose
And will is Jesus' will:
He hath not lost his life who seems to lose:
O hope deferred, hope still.

- Christina Rossetti

Dash and Pinch

2011-11-26T17:21:00.002-05:00

And this has nothing to do with the boys from high school, I assure you.

It occurred to me recently that I've had a sea change in how I cook. I always prided myself on being able to eyeball measurements -- I'd doublecheck with the important ones and my estimates were almost always correct -- but this year as I've had to start making substitutions to recipes, I've started to see recipes as mere suggestion, starting points. This is especially because I'm largely substituting maple syrup for sugar. The sweetness is not exactly the same and obviously one is a liquid and the other is a solid. There's probably a deep metaphor in this shift, but I can't put my finger on it.

*

I'm curious to know what things you think most people find easy that you find hard. And vice versa. I've been thinking about this lately, and even more specifically about the things I find hard to fit into my schedule that other people seem to find easy, or at least non-negotiable. For instance, while I walk the dog for probably a couple of hours each day, setting aside time for Pilates or other roll-out-the-mat exercise just falls by the wayside and before I know it, another week has passed without exercise. On the other hand, I hear people struggling to find time to finish a novel, and I find time to read a novel at least once or twice a week.

*

It's been just over six months since we became dog owners and there's one thing I'm still struggling with - and that is my intuition around how people respond to dogs. Just today, for instance, a dour-looking older woman with a cane limped out of the bank in front of me. I quickly reined my dog in, afraid he would try to greet the woman with his characteristic exuberance. Instead, she turned and called him and nuzzled him and loved him for a good five minutes. Another tottery elderly woman approached us and marveled at him, telling us twice how lucky we were to have him. I wouldn't have assumed this for the world. By contrast, one evening I was at the park with the pup when a man with a small dog came along. His dog was off-leash and was tiny. I called to him, asking if he minded me letting my puppy off leash. He was happy for me to -- until my puppy ran over to his and started running circles around him, at which point the man freaked out. I muttered choice words under my breath as I locked the dog back on leash.

Maybe it's because children start out mostly immobile and even restricted in arms or strollers, and dogs are more actively social than babies, but I could sense the people who liked kids and those who didn't. With dogs, there seems to be no rhyme or reason. There also seem to be even more pet-rearing philosophies than there are schools of thought for raising kids. I'm comfortable for the most part in how we're raising our puppy, but my intuition on how the pup should interact with other people is just completely off. It's weird and unsettling.

*

This week, my daughter,her friend and I delivered the bags of toys, books and clothes to the refugee family. I'm struggling to find words to express the experience. Both girls rated the experience a 10/10 and want to take the little girls skating sometime. I was deeply relieved that our experience was relaxed, friendly, and laughter-filled. Part of what gives me pause for thought is that this family has extremely well-educated parents who had professional jobs, a maid and nanny before they left their former home. Now they live on the charity of others and do all they can to give their family a fresh start. What I saw -- and I hope they could see that I saw -- was that they were me (sans the maid and nanny -- alas). Shift our government situation to intolerable and unsafe, and all I know of a comfortable life could be gone. I hope if I were in a similar situation, someone would help me -- no strings attached, no benevolent hierarchy to our essential worth. I think that's both what I deeply enjoy about being with refugees and also what calls me to action: while refugees are often lumped in with other people who need forms of social assistance, their realities are often significantly different, surprisingly similar to our own. The best moment of all this week was when the littlest girl, who is 2, pulled out of the bag a baby doll who is black and who has little stubby pigtails. The mother started to laugh. "It looks like us!" she said. And then to her daughter, "It looks exactly like you!" Our bigger girls had spent their time shopping and this was perhaps their proudest purchase. When you see yourself in someone or something else, I think it gives you a little sense of belonging, a sense of home.

Top 10

2011-11-24T22:39:00.008-05:00

When my friend Rebecca and I were in high school, we regularly amused ourselves in boring classes by writing our Top 10 lists of Boys We Liked. It was fun to see who emerged as frontrunners, who sank into oblivion, which unattainables were under consideration. It was less fun when our history teacher confiscated a note from under one foot as it was sliding toward another.

Be assured I'm not going (Aaron Eckhart, Viggo Mortenson, Dave Fish) to write another such (George Clooney) top ten list. Instead, in honour of last night's fabulous supper, I'd like to try to itemize my top 10 most memorable meals of all time.

In chronological order:

1. I met a guy at a youth conference when I was in grade 10. He lived forty-five minutes away, but long distance by telephone. We "dated" -- largely by letter and brief telephone call -- for a year. On our anniversary, he sent me a dozen long-stemmed red roses and borrowed his brother's car to take me out to dinner. We went to a steak house near the Toronto airport where we ate steak and where he tricked me into trying the first espresso coffee of my life. And then he never ever called me again. I think it was that, rather than the espresso, that made the bitterness so unforgettable.

2. In the fall of my grade 13 year, my grandparents decided to take a spontaneous trip to Mexico City to surprise their son, my uncle, who was there on business. They invited me along. I bought leather and silver, looked at fine art, gilded cathedrals, damage from a recent earthquake and more. I drank Mexican beer and ate beans, beans and more beans. We were there for a week. I think it was the last day when I spotted a Kentucky Fried Chicken. After a solid week of beans, something that would have seemed cheap and tawdry at home had a glow to it. I didn't care if that glow was saturated fat. I was having me a drumstick.

3. Dave and I spent a month in Australia a year after we were married. We arrived in Melbourne by plane and took a bus into the city. We were waiting to transfer to the area where we thought we might look for a hotel, when someone asked us where we were going. We mentioned the neighbourhood. "Oh," she said. "That's where the pros, addicts and killahs live." I could handle ladies of the evening and drugs, but killers were another matter. We took her advice and a different bus and ended up at a sedate neighbourhood bedsitting room. One night, we went out to a restaurant with massive plate glass windows that served us what was the finest meal I could remember. The only part I remember now was the dessert, which was a chocolate terrine, surrounded by local tropical fruits.

4. Before we left Melbourne on Sunday morning, we decided to visit a church that had been recommended to us by friends in Toronto who had lived there. Again we climbed aboard a bus and rode for more than an hour before we wandered around a remote residential neighbourhood, heavy suitcases in hand, hoping we were close. We found the church, attended a good service and afterwards, when we were greeted, mentioned the names of our friends. These names were gold, magic words, incantations. We were whisked off to a country home, a ranch, where we were two of probably twenty or thirty guests who sat at one long burnished wood table, gleaming in the sunshine, fed lavishly on Australian beef, raised on the back forty. After the meal, we were packed up and driven to the airport, satisfied in so many ways.

5. The night we arrived in Italy, three years ago, I cried from distance from my babies and from jetlag that felt as if gravity had increased fourfold. Our heads drooped as we waited in our room in the convent we stayed at, on our iron twin beds, for the magic dinner hour of eight o'clock. Then we descended marble staircases into a wood-lined dining room, where we were served by nuns who spoke not a word of English. Our meal began with salad and homemade pasta tossed in the lightest of tomato sauces and glasses of sharp fresh red wine, made by the monks at the nearby monastery. Just when we thought we were full, we were urged to Mangia, Mangia, before the next course arrived: platters of lightly breaded and fried white fish -- enough for our entire far-flung family -- a bowl of buttered boiled yellow potatoes and another with green beans tossed with cheese. And then came dessert: a heavy delectable pound cake. And then a plate with hunks of cheese, including Reggiano, larger than my fist, and a bowl of mixed fruits, including blood orange. And then the nuns rolled us upstairs into our beds where we slept the sleep of good children before waking to open the shutters and look down at the olive groves and violets, Florence in the mid-distance, and the purple mountains beyond.

6. We knew Florence would be the main part of our Italian trip, but we wanted another destination too, for a couple of days. We decided to go to Parma for the cheese and Modena for the balsamico. Our first day was terrifying: we took the cluttered coastal route so I could see the Mediterranean (I got one glimpse) and then drove along gasp-inducing precipices through the Italian Alps on the wrong side of the road, with no map and unhelpful road signs. We found our bed and breakfast by luck, and then set out to meet Dave's friend in Modena, passing North African prostitutes every 100 metres along the side of the bucolic country road. It felt dark. The next day was light in every sense. It was a light spring day and we had no plans and so we drove from ruined castle to farmer's market to cheese shop, on brilliant green hillsides. We went to a spa built nearly a century ago after a farmer digging broke open a sulphuric blast of hot mineral water. We soaked and even fell asleep among Italians of every shape and size. And then we asked our innkeeper for the best place to eat -- a place locals would go. He suggested a place and called them to secure us a table. The owner was shy of us -- tourists never came to this 1960s style two-storey house, with the main floor now converted to a small restaurant. He circled the room but avoided us. His daughter served us and his wife cooked. We guessed -- wrongly -- at the menu and ended up with rare steak served over beds of arugula, and delicious pumpkin ravioli tossed in sage butter. At the end of the meal, we had to settle up with Papa at the bar, and he ventured a short conversation. Learning we were from Canada, he told us he had once been to Niagara Falls.

7. I didn't eat this one, but a few years ago I went alone to Washington to a Catholic arts conference, where speakers fought and every meal was Mexican food (I still have an aversion to wraps), and I met the weirdest people who lied and drank margaritas in the pale May sun, wearing large crosses around their necks and brushing off homeless people. At the last session of the conference, New Zealand performance artists used different materials to talk about redemption. Among them, and best of all, they draped an altar in this white stone cathedral with a white linen cloth, broke open fragrant, steaming hot bread and then uncorked a bottle of dark red wine and poured the wine lavishly over the bread. The guy with the largest cross was offended but I wept for the extravagance, the lavishness, the wastefulness of the communion.

8. Two years ago, I hosted a fundraiser/dinner party for 30 people and cooked singlehandedly. By the time the guests arrived, I was utterly done in and ready to collapse into a pile of mush, but I was also deeply satisfied. I have always loved cooking for large groups of people. I cooked for retreats through university and I love the challenge of feeding people really well on a shoestring budget. I haven't repeated my dinner party feat though.

9. A word should be said for every meal served at the end of a serious illness, for every glass of cool water drunk on a stifling hot day. Those meals satisfy like few other.

10. And last night. Oh, last night. Nan is in my writers group and among the many thoughtful pieces she has brought to us were a series of poems about the coming of age of a young Mennonite girl. The poems have now been published into a lovely collection, complete with recipes Nan developed and charming paintings by Mennonite artist Peter Etril Snyder. Last night, a local restaurant (Nick and Nat's Uptown 21) served a meal, based around the book and the seasons. I knew by the time the appetizer was served that this would make the list. The appetizer was simple slices of whole grain bread, served with a small cup of what turned out to be white wine vinegar and grapeseed oil. It sang on my tongue. Although not as much as the salad course. We had chosen to sit at the chef's table, a perch on the side of an open bar, overlooking the narrow galley kitchen. We watched as the frisee lettuce was tossed like wool and scattered carefully onto plates. We watched as the sous-chef sliced apples thinly with a mandoline, and cauliflower too, then tossed these in a maple-mustard vinaigrette. The frisee hid small piles of zesty pickled green beans, topped with the apples and cauliflower and scattered with tiny cubes of extra-old cheddar. My mouth died and went to heaven then. There was to be no talking and much moaning. The main course was a hot sour cream potato salad and sauerkraut, topped with individual smoked and braised pork shanks. Dessert was a pear sauce smeared on a plate with a puff of whipped cream and then a too-thin slice of dutch apple pie and a pile of strawberry-rhubarb custard crisp. Every course came with a paired wine. The coffee, I must report, was not good -- which made me realize I had not simply fallen into a trance, but I was discriminating and still, nearly every bite was a marvel. I told Nan she needed to write another book. And soon.

Nineveh

2011-11-23T14:38:00.001-05:00

I think I've mentioned here before that a stumbling block between my novels and publication is that the fact that they aren't religious enough for that market, but they're too religious for the regular market.

My argument has always been that I think that's where most of us live.

Over the last couple of years, I feel like I've been living there more than usual. There are about seven factors that have contributed to a dulling of my faith (in no particular order, I believe them to be Facebook, busyness in the church, anxiety, unanswered prayers, outward busyness and the beginnings of midlife hormones. And apparently one more that slips my mind right now.)

I think it's kind of rare to admit it though. Recently, at church, we were asked a "have you ever experienced x...?" question -- and one person I was talking with said, "I'm in the middle of such an experience right now and I'm not sure how it's going to end." I really do find that rare. We're supposed to pick a side, I think - faithful or faithless, devout or profane -- and if we secretly start to pray or stop praying, we're supposed to keep that hush-hush.

I've had quick moments of conversion in my life: at camp, as a child, someone explained the Bible to me and it was an ah-ha moment. After years of random Sunday School stories about all sorts of characters, I suddenly understood that at the centre of the Christian message was Jesus and God's love for people. Then, ten years later, I had another experience where scales fell from my eyes, and I broke up with a guy who was really destructive for me, and got back into a healthy place, emotionally and spiritually over the course of a weekend.

But a lot of the time, it's a slow process with two steps forward, one step back, and a few side shuffles thrown in for good measure. At least it is for me, and for my characters.

A former professor of mine wrote a book a few years back, on murder mysteries, in which he offered the idea that the absence of God was an argument for God's existence. It is not, he thought, the settled experiences we have of God that are proof of God or our faith, but our longings and cravings. By this measure, I'm a faithful egg.

The last time I really had a crisis of faith was just after university. I was living in one corner of Toronto and commuting to the opposite corner -- by bus, subway and streetcar. My streetcar took me through some bleak neighbourhoods filled with bleaker, ravaged faces and lives. But, between the prone bodies of the addicts and homeless hopped little sparrows with bright eyes, being sustained even in winter. I thought of the verses about sparrows - Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. (Mt.10:29-31) - and somehow I was able to believe.

This time around, I have been very certain that the struggles I have are with my ability to believe and not with the object of my beliefs. But at the same time, I've wondered how I can make myself find God?

Part of my problem has been an absence of problems. I don't have any philosophical issues with God and faith, really. What I've come to see, though, is that more than anything, my spirit has atrophied. I have always identified with Mary in the pairing of Mary and Martha - the one who wants nothing more than to sit and listen at the feet of Jesus. But my life has demanded Martha-ness of me and you know what? Stop sitting and listening, and you start to become Martha-like.

I think about my dry old gardens and how they sigh with relief when it finally rains. But first, the rain runs off the parched ground, right over top of it, because it's too dry and hardened to allow it in.

Some time ago, I got away and my Bible reading was the book of Jonah. Maybe you know the story beyond the whale part: God tells guy to go and invite the people he hates to redirect; guy says no, runs in opposite direction and is thoroughly redirected himself. I had heard someone say once that if you felt distant from God, you should go back and figure out where you went off track. In my reading of Jonah, I asked myself: what is the Nineveh I'm running from?

Honestly, I was stumped.

Until it hit me over the head: Nineveh is me. I can't say how profound that was for me, to recognize that I can't find God when I run from myself. Julian of Norwich, the medieval mystic, writes,

"For I saw very surely that our substance is in God, and I also saw that God is in our sensuality, for in the same instant and place in which our soul is made sensual, in that same instant and place exists the city of God, ordained from him without beginning. He comes into this city and will never depart from it, for God is never out of the soul, in which he will dwell blessedly without end. (287)

and

"When we know and see, truly and clearly, what our self is, then we shall truly and clearly see and know our Lord God in the fullness of joy" (258).

Exactly how do we run away from ourselves? Well, I do it when I get like Martha - continuing on in my superhuman tasks until my human strengths give out and my human emotions spill over.

It's funny to think that what God calls us to might not be India or Africa or no-more-fun, but precisely the opposite: to laugh, to rest, to be, to hope, to play, to dance, to sing, to grow.

Funny but true.

A Fine Balance

2011-11-21T13:56:00.003-05:00

The other day, we were driving home along the highway when our daughter noticed a toddler jumping around inside another car. We got talking about the silliness of not wearing seatbelts -- they don't hurt or constrict, so why not? Our eldest opined that once, just once, he'd like to climb into the back of a pick-up truck and drive around.

My husband, who knows teenagers well, looked in the rearview mirror at our invincible son and began a conversation about where and when this could and couldn't happen. Camp roads ok. Drunk driver not ok. Farm field ok, especially if en route to pick apples or some destination. Aimless joy riding, not ok.

To every caveat, our son made a reassuring but cleverly noncommittal sound: Mmm. I commented on this: that he had not agreed to anything but clearly had taken in what his dad was saying.

Last night, I brought the topic up again. In the last two weeks, I've heard of two young men dying, both of unexpected natural causes. I've seen photos and read stories posted by family and friends in their grief. In both instances, there are such good tales to tell -- silliness, joy, dressing up, and just so much life.

And that's what I said to my boy last night. I said, if I knew you were going to die at 24, and I had to choose, I would so rather that you lived fully and savoured life, than that you always had your homework done and were a fairly nice kid. I want you to live. On the other hand, I said, if I knew you were going to die of some foolhardy idiocy of your own making (or your friends'), I'd be so mad at you and myself.

It's a balancing act, I said to the teen, between being full-on, as my Aussie cousins say, and being stupid.

And sometimes, death is not on the table, but the balance must still be found. My boy had a vague idea about hanging out with his friends on the PD day, at a girl's house. When I expressed reservation about the idea -- for I was once a teen at a boy's house -- he could not believe his ears. I trust this kid deeply. He has such a good head on his shoulders and a good heart to boot. He's willing to do the unpopular thing and with flair, when needed. But he does still believe he's untouchable.

I told him he could go, but I asked him to watch to see whether I was right -- whether idle hands and all that. In the end, the plans fell apart altogether, and he and I played with the dog in the sandtraps on the golf course instead.

But here we go.

Gullible on the Ceiling

2011-11-21T12:05:00.003-05:00

My sons have this line they use on their sister who is, I admit, fairly easy to fool. When one of us says something obviously over-the-top untrue and she says, "Really?" they say, "Hey look, there's gullible on the ceiling."

Yesterday, I saw this photo on the Internet and it reminded me of one of my own many gullible moments.

The year was 1992. We had been married a year and were using my uncle's wedding gift: frequent flyer points for a trip to visit Australia. We were staying at his house in Sydney for a week, before spending time in Melbourne, a week driving up the Gold Coast (snorkeling and scuba diving and avoiding snakes along the way), and a week at a luxurious resort before returning home to the armpit of North America and our little Toronto apartment.

Maybe we were jetlagged. Actually, it's certain we were jetlagged, but I'm not sure I can use that as an excuse because Dave was as tired as I was and he didn't fall for it -- and I did.

We had read our travel books before going and we knew that among Australia's chief exports were Mel Gibson, The Man from Snowy River, vegemite and opals. So, one day, we were wandering around in The Rocks, a gentrified, touristy area that used to be the holding area for convicts when they landed near Sydney's iconic bridge. (OK, fine, the bridge wasn't there at the time of landing.) We knew we weren't going to make it to Uluru or really any of the outback, so when I saw a sign offering us a tour of a Genuine Opal Mine, I jumped at the opportunity and Dave gamely went along.

We went inside a lovely lobby, paid our money and waited for an elevator to take us down into the mine. If I recall correctly, it was during the long and bumpy elevator ride that I started to wonder. When the elevator stopped, the back door opened and we walked out into what was not a genuine opal mine, but a recreation of a mine, a small museum of opal artifacts. We learned about opals and how they were formed and mined and blah blah blah, and as we walked the floor sloped upward and we followed the path. As our experience came to an end, we turned a corner and found ourselves back in the original lobby. Not only was this not a genuine opal mine but the elevator had been a simulator and we had dropped maybe three feet.

Dave laughed and laughed, and I felt like a dork for thinking there might in fact be a storefront mine in the middle of downtown Sydney.

A few days later, a little older and wiser, we spent our first wedding anniversary in the Blue Mountains. The name comes from the air which is tinged blue by low-hanging eucalyptus oil from the trees that cover the mountains. We took a train up into the mountains and then walked from one hilly hippy town to another. We stayed in a Man-from-Snowy-River-like plantation and the wind shook our guesthouse all night long. We ate food on our anniversary in the smokiest, artsiest of restaurants and loved it.

The next day dawned clear and we decided to visit a little town that had two tourist attractions: a gondola that swung out between two mountain peaks, over a valley far far below, and The World's Steepest Railway. I decided to let Dave go alone on the gondola - the people in my family are all tall and we believe that is the origin of our fear of heights - and instead climb aboard the tamer railway car for a picturesque choo-choo ride.

My first clue should have been the padded bars on the roof of the open car, which resembled nothing so much as a roller coaster. I climbed aboard, strapped myself in and soon we were chugging along. Then we were chugging through a tunnel and suddenly we were chugging straight down the mountainside. The angle of descent was probably 87 degrees, but all I could do was grip the padded bar with sweaty hands and claws, praying and squeezing my eyes shut. This was no genuine opal mine -- THIS WAS A GENUINE OPAL MINE.

The engineer slammed on the brakes and I opened my eyes to see that we were parked at a type of metal scaffolding, on which we were invited to disembark to take photos and enjoy the scenery. Halfway up -- or down -- a mountain, depending on how you looked at it. Which I did not.

I had learned a little Australian (Strine) by this time, and I thought to myself: No. Bloody. Way. I did open my eyes to the lovely view, but my hands stayed firmly locked around the bar and my prayers were unceasing.

When my fellow passengers climbed back aboard, we ascended the mountainside in reverse. Dave's gondola ride was long since done and he was waiting for me at the top, camera in hand, ready to capture my bug-eyed stare and my eternal gratitude for being on level ground once more, ready to believe the claim that this was indeed the world's steepest railway.

My point is that sometimes being gullible -- believing every claim -- serves you and sometimes it doesn't. Just look for the padded bars. That's your clue.

Are You Honey or Are You Sweetie?

2011-11-17T09:09:00.004-05:00

The other night at my writers' group, I served our usual tea: Creativity Tea is a rooibus tea, with lemon peel, orange peel, red pepper, lemongrass, basil, fennel, ginger, rosemary, cardamom and apple added in. The tea became a staple after one particularly productive (and laughter-filled) night when we decided that the tea had indeed contributed to our creativity.

I take my tea straight. Nothing added. So do a few of the other writers. But some take honey. It's become one of my goofy standing jokes to ask every one of them as I pour, "Are you honey... (pause)... or are you sweetie?"

I didn't intend to write about honey today, but after reading this article, honey it is. To summarize: 1/3 of all honey sold in US grocery stores (and presumably Canada isn't much better) is imported from China. Fully 75% of all honey sold in the US is modified before sale so that the health-giving pollen is removed.

Not my honey.

We fell into honey almost a decade ago when we first visited my sister's cottage on the Gaspe peninsula. Let me say that you go to the Gaspe for the scenery and not the tourist attractions. Let me also say that the weather there separates opinion as surely as pollen is separated from honey: there are glorious days of sunshine and there are dismal epochs of cold, hard fog and biting drizzle. A person with three preschoolers looks for distraction wherever she can find it. In our first rainy year, we visited the glass-walled salmon ladder to watch the fish struggle upstream, and Capitaine Homard to see the lobster-themed kitsch and golf course. We walked to the little corner store. And that was pretty much the extent of it until we found the honey place.

The honey place is called Le Vieux Moulin and it is indeed an old mill, red-painted on a long narrow strip of land that runs perpendicular to the nearby St. Lawrence. You climb rickety wooden stairs to the porch, and open the screen door to the front room which is decorated purely in honey. There is a tasting station with popsicle sticks and honey jars covered with pumps. There are varieties of honey -- early spring, midsummer, buckwheat, and more. There is creamed honey and liquid. You stand with your family and discuss your tastes. You look at the tables with honey soap, honey cough drops, small bee-topped honey jars, honey vinaigrette. You look at the cooler and its mead. (Once you buy the too-sweet wine, made from a recipe as old as the mill, and you know never to do that again, lest you fall into a diabetic coma and your teeth fall out in an instant.) You spend time at the glass-sided beehive at the side of the room, looking intently for the queen, feeling the buzz of the bees under the glass. One time, you pay the fee to go upstairs to see the seventeenth century Quebecois museum of well-preserved local artifacts and furniture. You sign the guest book every single time -- and look for people from your home area (Burlington! Guelph!) as well as your last signature.

But mostly you buy honey. A case of honey at least. Some liquid for the kids and creamed for the older eaters. A couple more for gifts. (One year, you can't go east and your sister buys the honey for you -- and tells the person delivering it that it must be all gifts. No, you think, that will last us until April.)

And why do you do it. You do it to take a literal piece of this place home with you -- its flowers transformed into honey, since you can't take home their scent. You do it to do whatever you can to keep this place going for another three or four hundred years. You do it because it tastes so good.

***

This year, we had a puppy and my sister had a baby with challenges and so we did not go east by mutual decision. Instead we went south to the Finger Lakes. As I think I've written here, we were not disappointed by the change, as much as I feared we would be. We had a lovely time -- and there was not one speck of fog.

But there had to be honey. I decreed it so. I read ahead of time that there was a beekeeper who brought local honey to the market in Ithaca. But we went on the quieter midweek market and the farmer wasn't there. We were not deterred. We had an address, and it became an adventure.

We had the most basic of tourist maps, and it found us the hamlet where the beekeeper lived. We followed slow-moving farm vehicles along a winding road set among rolling green hills and -- surprising to us -- Mennonite farms. We found the road -- but was it left or right. No word of a lie -- ask my embarrassed children and husband -- we turned around four times on the fairly short road before we called the phone number I had jotted down. We were so close we drove down the road farther -- and watched a barn being raised by committee -- to make it seem that we had come from a reasonable distance before we pulled up.

This honey place was a small shed, almost like the kind rural children use to hide from the wind as they wait for schoolbuses. It was an honour system -- we did not have to hope for the best against rapidfire patois French as we did at Le Vieux Moulin. We never saw anyone as we chose between kinds of honey and kinds of containers. There was linden honey and other tree-versions of honey, as well as buckwheat and clover. We made our picks, changed our minds, and picked again.

The honey tastes different, just as New York tasted different from Quebec.

What is the same is that we have summer in a jar, the best of our holidays preserved, a dash of authentic sweetness to add to my life.

So, here's to the beekeepers and the bees, the neighbours who make our lives sweeter and who preserve a good way of life and good health with their labours. I'd raise a glass of mead to them, if only they would drink it for me. I'll stick to my tea and the sweetness of creativity on a cold fall night.

Mall Rats - Part Two

2011-11-12T09:20:00.003-05:00

It appears the plan is working!

Remember my elaborate scheme about making and selling crafts to raise funds to buy toys and clothes for refugee kids? Well, it has actually happened.

For weeks, our piano was stacked with colourful folds of fleece. The idea was that my daughter could tie knots in the blankets any time she watched television. The reality was that I knotted some of the blankets while I watched television, although she did more than a little.

There were four blue, yellow and green star blankets, and four pink, sage and yellow flowered blankets. Actually there were only three of the latter, as I used one for a baby shower.

Last weekend, we delivered the blankets, with notes pinned to them, explaining their story. A friend was hosting what she called a Living Room Market, where crafty people could sell their wares, and a portion of the proceeds went to refugee families. We stopped by twice during the day -- the first time, none had sold. The second time, two had sold. We gathered the blankets in our arms, preparing to leave, and then the vendors swarmed us, buying all the blankets in a matter of seconds. We were jubilant.

While this could have been a lesson in economics (profit = sale price - costs), I had decided to donate the material cost. My friend also waived her portion of the total, so the two girls were left with $120.

A friend who works with refugees had told us about a family, new to Canada, who had fled their home with their now 5 and 2 year old daughters, literally overnight, leaving all their toys, dolls and games behind.

Our girls were armed with a full wallet and eagerness. Yesterday, the other mom accompanied them to the mall, and let them go off on their own with a cell phone, to do their shopping.

Two hours later, they arrived at my house, laden with three shopping bags -- and $4.98 in change. We emptied the contents out on the dining room table. I'll tell you what they bought, but don't tell the little girls who will receive the toys in the next couple of weeks:

- Playdough
- Two colouring books (they had asked for colouring books specifically)
- Two soft soft full-sized teddy bears
- Two small, big-eyed stuffed animals (a dog and a panda. They had considered a reindeer, but decided that their toys needed to have staying power beyond Christmas)
- Two Barbies and a smaller plastic doll
- Ablack-skinned baby doll (We had talked about the fact that it would be a good thing to find dolls that looked like the girls, if at all possible. My daughter commented later that her own skin is significantly darker than the peach colour usually called skin tone, and that no one actually looks like a Barbie.)
- Two colourful pairs of mittens
- A white ruffled sweater for the older girl
- A funky, striped pink dress/tunic for the toddler.

The family had requested a skipping rope and books too, but the girls are donating these out of their own abundant collections.

I have to say that the choices they made seemed absolutely perfect. They talked about the stores they had visited, their instincts to go to the sales rack, the things they had put back because they were too costly.

Now we're at the final step: the part where the big girls meet the little girls. Probably the awkwardness will all be on the adults' side. The girls are eager to meet the little ones they've been dreaming about.

We've all decided that this isn't going to be a Christmas thing, but here's what I suspect: when we watch the little girls have their own toys and craft supplies again, it will feel exactly like Christmas morning, at least for one of us.

Dear Diary

2011-11-09T09:44:00.002-05:00

My apologies for not writing all week. As my sister would say, "I don't have two minutes to rub together."

All is well. Back soon.

S

The Mighty Pen

2011-11-02T13:46:00.003-04:00

This is what it means to operate a new small business: you ask for and receive samples of promotional pens, and you spend earnest time and consultation figuring out which pen really says what you want it to say.

It's a writing business so, of course,the pen has to write smoothly. But that is not all.

The pen that felt best in my hand had a nice hourglass figure to it, but within a short time of using it, the writing on the side of the pen -- the promotional part -- had already started to be scratched off. What is the point of buying hundreds of sixty cent pens if no one can read what they advertise? Another pen was jazzy -- crystal clear, cool grip, jewel colours -- but I've used that type of pen before and it falls apart pretty quickly. Pen Number Three just felt cheap, and while I'm all for economical, I'm not about cheap.

There is no end to the listening in this start-up process, the quiet feeling out what fits and what doesn't. The printer offers me notepads for a great price and I say no. I'm hoping throughout that my intuition, my spidey sense is on.

I don't even ask environmental questions along the way -- although the pens I choose are not manufactured overseas, so I'm hoping that means the standards are decent.

The pen I choose, in the end, has a slim barrel, a medium point, a click pen rather than one with a lid. It doesn't blob ink. The printing appears that it will be almost engraved on the pen. It's the kind of pen you'd like to stick in your purse or by the phone. It's the kind of pen that doesn't slow you down when it's time to write.

Five Years

2011-10-31T12:13:00.003-04:00

The frost must have come earlier five years ago. Because the leaves then were all yellow-gold, tumbling to earth one after another.

Five years ago today, we bought a house we had only seen nine hours before.

But, of course, it had started sooner than that. It started with a restlessness, a certainty that something was about to change. It began with a dream that stuck in my mind, a dream that meant something: a dream in which I showed my mother-in-law a new house, one that had a lake out the back window, two kitchens, extensive storage, and a Subway restaurant next door. To her every objection - for the house in the dream was dilapidated and filled with the previous owner's belongings - I had a confident response. ( "A Subway -- how convenient!")

I spotted the house online, accidentally, the day before. I was about to leave home but I took a moment to call our agent, to insist on seeing the house as soon as possible.

He and I arrived at the house, only to be greeted by the owner's agent who told us they were already entertaining an offer. My agent parried with the fact that we had the right, because of our appointment, to make an offer as well. We stepped inside and saw blue shag carpet, mirror after mirror, every surface wallpapered, the kitchen painted jet black, the floor strewn with chicken bones and soiled laundry, every window hung askew with dusty venetian blinds. I almost didn't bother.

But I did persist beyond the toilet held together with a rusty paperclip, the jacuzzi tub encrusted with mould and hair, the vines that snaked through the garden, the goldenrod, the tilted deck, the homemade wiring job strung throughout the basement, the hole straight through the roof and the ceiling.

(Is it any wonder the neighbours stopped by after we arrived, placed grateful hands on our forearms and blessed us for having rescued the house? Is it any wonder I have no time for home renovation television: I live the reality.)

We had renovated a house before, from top to bottom. Dave had fitted drywall together against a gabled roof, in a way that resembled a jigsaw puzzle. We had roofed, re-windowed, stripped, removed bricks with a chisel, removed a cat from a wall. Dave is more than handy and I have vision and a work ethic.

This house would try those skills. They would try our networks of friends and family, and our pocketbooks. I remember my dad -- who had not seen the house -- trying to rein me in by reminding me that the house didn't need to be perfect before we moved in. I became hysterical with laughter: I was going for safe and dry. And wallpaper-free. I remember a friend who saw me in the throes of renovation during the two-week window we had between taking possession of one house and letting go of the other: it was a painting day and that was obvious from my clothes, my hair and my hands.

But October 31 was the day we saw the house. As I walked through the house, there were two or three places that felt like home. There was storage galore. There was an inground pool, a fireplace. It was all of two blocks from the kids' school. The price was right.

I called Dave and he had time between classes. We walked through the house and then stood on the back hill behind the house, literally and figuratively counting the cost.

What I remember most clearly that day was how everything fell into place. The picture that came to my mind was of a barn with both doors swung wide open. It seemed there was no question about whether or not to proceed.

I made the offer myself as Dave had to go back to work. That meant I had to stay home from trick-or-treating that night, to sign back any adjustments, to respond to counter-offers.

It was 8:30 and we had blown out the candles in our pumpkins and were checking out the loot when the doorbell rang. It was not a sullen teenager in a hockey mask with a pillow case; it was our agent, informing us that the following year, we would be trick-or-treating from a new address.

Let me say that I don't recommend such a quick turnaround. Let me say that shock will hit at three in the morning. Let me say that some people will say that impulsiveness is foolishness. Let me say that I grieved for the loss of my first house, the one in which my daughter was born. Let me say too that this is not likely the house in which we will grow old. I miss an older house.

But I've loved the location -- the fact that my kids can be free range children, the fact that the golf course nearby affords us a clearer view of stars at night and a marvellous place to ski in the winter. It's a great house for having crowds of people over. We feel grateful every time we use the pool. We have the best neighbours I could ever imagine.

On the days when the yardwork seems overwhelming, it's fun to remember the difference five years makes. It's one of my war stories -- the uphill both ways story -- that we survived this overhaul and made a comfortable home.

We say however that the next time we're buying a fully-furnished brand new model home. And we're only half-joking.

Monkey Mind

2011-10-27T18:28:00.005-04:00

So here I am again with a million things on my mind.

1. The kids are better. So is the dog. Three of the six of our family were sick over the last few weeks. Partway through, I realized my anxiety was rooted in a thought: if I can't figure out what's wrong/if an illness lasts more than a few days, it must be something concerning. Once I decided that wasn't necessarily true, I relaxed significantly. It made me remember how much our thinking affects our experiences.

2. Halloween approacheth. We may be the least ready we've ever been. My daughter got her costume -- a cute Cookie Monster -- in mid-September, but Son #1 is not going out for the first time ever and Son #2 says it's all about the candy this year so he plans to throw something together at the last minute. How times have changed since the year I made him a giant spider costume or even last year when he was a hippy with an awesome Afro. As for me, I generally figure out something fun and simple -- a wig, a mask, false eyelashes, a full Sarah Palin costume -- to accompany the kids with. This year, I haven't found something that tickles my fancy. I had considered a Storm-from-the-X-Men costume, until I found out that Storm is always a black woman. (I'd love to be able to control the weather!) My latest thought is that I will make myself cat ears and will bring the dog with me -- and we will be a cat and a dog who get along. Pathetic, I know. We've abandoned thoughts of decorating the dog.

3. Speaking of Halloween, we visited Goderich last weekend for the first time since the tornado two months ago. What devastation. So many venerable old houses looked like they had war wounds -- mostly boarded-up windows that looked like patched eyes. It's the Square that is completely devastated though and all the shops around it that look like a war zone. It was more cleaned up than people had led me to believe it was -- and the clean-up continued even on a Sunday afternoon -- but what struck me was that there was far too much light. Which means far too few trees. But, the spirit of this town has been strong, and so too, apparently, is their Halloween spirit. I wished I had my camera for the one house on the highway that had Gone All Out for Halloween. Their porch in particular caught my eye: it was decorated with strung up, bloodied Cabbage Patch kids. If we lived in that town, I'm pretty sure we'd skip that house on our trick-or-treating route.

4. In a freelance world that is nearly always feast or famine, I need to report that I have a Just Right amount of work this fall. I'm really grateful for that. It's good, interesting work and it keeps me busy but not stressed out.

5. When things were really crazy this spring, I told Dave I needed a new outlet and that I was going to become a baseball fan. And then I promptly forgot about the idea. Until the World Series began. I've been obsessed with the team with the nice little red birds on their chests. Who kept me up until the wee smalls last night watching them come back from behind -- five times.

6. I learned a new word last week in the weirdest way. The Internets told me that Justin Bieber had released a lovely new Christmas song. I listened to it and was charmed, but there was one word I couldn't quite understand. Here it is in context: "Imma be under the mistletoe with you, shawty, with you." Imma, I got. Actually as much as it's technically an abuse of the English language, I really like the syncopation of "Imma be under the mistletoe." It was 'shawty' that threw me. My first thought was that it was a girl's name but then I thought of all the young girls who would be disappointed by not being able to see themselves in the song. It had to be something more. I went to the trusty (and dreadfully rude) Urban Dictionary to look it up. Lo and behold, shawty derives from shorty and is apparently a term of affection a guy uses with a girl. Honestly I was amazed. (Remember though that I was the last person to find out that hosiery was out of fashion.) I checked in with my resident teen and he knew how to use shawty in a sentence.

7. Our leaves are the very last to fall in our neighbourhood. Most of them are still green. We have four massive maple trees in our front yard. The city promises to come by once to suck up raked leaves at the curb. They came by earlier this week, when we had about seven leaves in trhe gutter. Now the perennial race is on: will our leaves fall before the city finishes their sucking? will the snow fall before the leaves fall? will the city have time to make a second pass at our street? will we have to resort to filling hundreds of bags? Stay tuned.

8. I've written about this before but I'm starting to like this time of year. Not for one moment do I like short days, but I like bare branches and golden-leaved trees. There's something noble in the stark beauty of this season. I like the silhouettes of leafless trees against brilliant early sunsets.

9. I've been talking with a newlywed friend lately about where we get our pictures and expectations of marriage. I know that, as a writer, there needs to a plot arc and compelling characters. I know that I want to live and love with passion. At the same time, aren't we all just amateurs doing our best to be kind and honest with one another? And don't the glamourous images we get from magazines only make us discontented and filled with unrealistic expectations, even in the face of what is a pretty great life?

How about you? What's on your mind these days?

Don't know much about Genealogy

2011-10-25T12:07:00.005-04:00

I like comfort reading when life gets stressful -- I often turn to the Anne of Green Gables series. Last night, I was weary (see yesterday's post to know why) and took to the bath with one of my daughter's books, Laura Ingalls Wilder's -- On the Shores of Silver Lake.

(Before I go on, let me note that I'm not going to be Laura's Ma anytime soon. Laura's Ma accepts every hardship and move to wolf-infested, terribly isolated territory with extreme equanimity. Her weakest moments include not being able to whip up food as she recovers from the scarlet fever that leaves Mary blind, and sitting on Pa's knee after a tragedy takes place. I'm more of a Susanna Moodie kind of pioneer myself: sure you gird your loins, but you write down a few complaining letters along the way. And you don't simply answer: yes, Charles, to every new scheme.)

On the Shores of Silver Lake takes place on the banks of a small lake in North Dakota. There is a winter scene in which Laura and Carrie slide on the ice after dark, only to realize they are being watched by an enormous buffalo wolf (which is a wolf, not a hybrid creature).

It made me think suddenly of a family story about my own paternal great-grandmother, who only died a dozen years ago, nearing the age of 100. She lived in rural Minnesota as a child, and remembered seeing buffalo roaming, but the story that always captured my imagination was this: she too lived on the shores of a lake. She and her siblings rode horses to school in the warmer months but more than once in the winter, when the lake was frozen well, they stood on the ice, opened their coats to the wind and were blown across to the far side of the lake.

Isn't that the best picture?

I've long held a theory that the desire to pursue genealogy strikes at a certain age, and usually just as one's forebears are losing their memories, when it is nearly too late. My mother has traveled to the small Isle of Man, in the middle of the Irish Sea, from which her grandparents emigrated to Canada. She visits graveyards and travels to see the estate where my great grandfather worked as a gardener. My brother-in-law, too, is putting together an extensive family tree, using websites and contacting long-lost relatives who are also doing the painstaking jigsaw-puzzle work. In this family, the past is murky as the grandfather was, we think, the White Sheep of the Family, who went off to China as a medical missionary and lost touch with the rest of his family.

But either I haven't hit the magical age or I just don't have the gene to search out my genetic past.

I spent a lot of last year writing the first draft of a novel in which one of the main characters excavates her late grandmother's life by readying her house for sale. (It was weird then to have opportunity to go through my own grandma's things after she moved into the seniors' home. My writing had taught me that you can take months to do this; my experience showed me that you can find what you need in 45 minutes. Maybe the writing prepared me to know what to look for.)

But last night in the tub, I realized that my approach to family history is just really different. I would rather capture a few stories, a few moments that might not even be archetypal ones in the lives of my family, rather than retrace their steps, marriages, births and deaths. (Or maybe that's for now. Maybe I will wake up one day with the need to understand the scaffolding of my family. It is altogether possible.)

I love the story about my mom's parents, who eloped during the second World War, in part to avoid military service. Both my grandparents were working for hosiery companies at the time. They married secretly, spent the weekend away and returned to work. But it was a custom at my grandfther's factory to dip a newly-married man in the dye pots. When my grandfather arrived at his parents' house, stained purple, there was little hiding what he had done.

I've written before about how I like to capture a moment of my kids' lives, how I take a snapshot of who they are at that moment, twice a year. I think that's what I'm doing with my own past, and that of my characters too -- finding a story, in time, that tells something of who they were at least at that moment.

Here we go again

2011-10-24T11:53:00.003-04:00

Not knowing why your kid is sick is one of the most difficult things I can think of. And here we go again. It's been more than half a year since our last child went through pain and testing, and now here we go again. This is the third week for our second child with a stomach problem. I have deja vu all day long, in my heart and in my own stomach. I'm sanitizing, sterilizing, asking questions, taking child to doctor, letting child sleep, accepting that illness comes, trying to be thankful for small mercies, taking breaks along the way, remembering those whose kids suffer for lack of clean water and killing diseases, sanitizing some more.

But what I want is to know why. I always want to know why. Why am I so tired? Why does this or that happen? There's power in knowledge: our daughter would still be up till one every night with vomiting had we not figured out why she was sick.

I want that medical device they used on Star Trek, the one that looked like a remote control, that could be run over the body and scanned for a quick analysis of what was wrong.

In the absence of understanding, I point fingers, mostly at myself. Have I cleaned enough? Are they stressed and not telling me? Is something wrong with our house? Is there something psychological behind the illnesses?

What I learned last time is that I need breaks from this, even from the trying to understand, the trying to help. I need stories -- movies, books, the World Series. I need laughter and friends. I need people to come alongside to say it's okay, and not to suggest, even in fun, that I've done/not done something and this is my just desserts.

I keep thinking "well, thank heavens I don't have a fulltime job," and this morning I thought to myself, yes. Thank heavens I don't. I have lots of work to do, but no pressing deadlines or impossible clients. I can do what I need to do, and look after sick people. It's okay.

I tell myself, it will be okay.

Veggie Tales

2011-10-22T17:30:00.006-04:00

I tried last weekend. I tried again today.

Nope.

I couldn't bring myself to pull my withered old cherry tomato plants from the ground. The rest of the tomato plants went last week, and the green pepper bush was listing to the side today, so I jettisoned it too.

But last week, I fully gleaned every last red cherry tomato from the bushes and decided to leave the others on the vine to ripen. I didn't expect much, and today I set out on the sad end-of-season task of cleaning out the vegetable garden for good. But there were about three cups of newly reddened cherry tomatoes, with more still to come, if frost holds off.

These last tomatoes are really sweet. I needed tomatoes for a kitchen project I have planned for tomorrow, and it is a gift I don't take for granted to have land that grows produce mere steps from my back door. Some of the tomatoes had split but many were still good. I pulled every good one off and saved them for tomorrow's recipe.

As I looked among the dried brown vines that scarcely look as if they could hold themselves up, let alone pass life-giving nutrients on to the little fruit at their ends, I thought of my grandmother.

My grandma will be 91 and a half in a couple of weeks. She's had a crummy year or two compared to the rest of her life, but compared to most people her age, she's doing great. She moved into a retirement home nearly a year ago after a bad fall at a party. Once that broken hip healed from surgery, she had a little tussle with a bath mat that left her with a broken pelvis and wrist. That was in March.

I thought we were going to lose her then. Really, I've held my breath about her for the last few years -- although when I sent her flowers a few years back, explaining that I would rather send her flowers while she's living than at her funeral, she tartly declared that she had plans to be around for a while longer yet.

She had her feet up when I called the other day -- she was tired after doing a half hour on a stationary bicycle in the gym. At 91 and a half, she's doing what she can to regain her mobility after a fall. Most people don't: for most people, a broken hip signals the beginning of the end.

Realistically, the end will likely be sooner than later, both for my grandma and my cherry tomato plants. Death and frost come to us all eventually.

But, there's my grandma, still producing fruit, still sending out love and life to all her little cherry tomatoes, even in the late October of her life.

I'm not plucking those plants out of the garden until I really, really have to. No matter that my garden would be tidier, that I could cross that task off my list. Nope. Not while it's still doing what it was made to do. Not while it still has life.

And Now For Something Completely Divine

2011-10-21T23:10:00.006-04:00

So, a few weeks back on Facebook, a company I had "liked" offered a contest. Divine Chocolate is a fair trade chocolate company that has made my kryptonite all the years I've worked as a volunteer at Ten Thousand Villages: they make a version of mint-filled dark chocolate squares that I've bought, telling myself I can have a square a day. Ha ha ha.

The contest announced several new limited time holiday flavours: dark chocolate with cranberries and hazelnuts, milk chocolate with spiced cookies, dark chocolate hazelnut truffle, and milk chocolate with whole almonds. People were invited to describe the people with whom they would share a sample pack of chocolate.

I was cheeky. I suggested this had to be a trick question -- that any chocolate lover was greedy about her chocolate. I said something about saving crumbs for my family and making recommendations more widely.

I did look back to see if I had won, and put it out of my mind until early this week when I spotted an item on the Divine news feed asking the following winners, drawn randomly (alas for all the earnest folk who suggested they would share with their mum or their kids), to send in their mailing addresses. Lo and behold, I saw my name and did as I was bid.

This morning, I came home from walking the dog to discover a small cardboard box on my doorstep. My first thought was that I had been "boo'd" -- an occasional Halloween version of a Secret Santa -- but it was The Chocolate.

And not only the chocolate. I had to take photos as I unwrapped the box. Shipping chocolate is delicate business, as it turns out. Not only was there crumpled paper along with the explanation and survey, but the bars were wrapped in a heat-sensitive bubble wrap, and nestled beside a squishy cold pack, that was still cold, and which would keep the bars at optimum temperature.

I took out my bars and lined them up. I opened the Divine Guide to Chocolate Tasting and read carefully the pages about how to taste chocolate. I decided it would be a public service to share the how to's with you here.

Appearance: I was given a list of possible adjectives to describe the appearance of my chocolate -- was it glossy, shiny, dull, mottled, waxy,discoloured? Was it coarse or crumbly at the edges? (I can report that my chocolate was glossy indeed, with divine little hearts printed on its squares.)

Touch: Apparently chocolate should feel silky not sticky, waxy or gritty in one's hand. (As much as touch is one of my keenest senses, I had never focused here before, although I probably would have noticed gritty.)

Sound: The lower the cocoa content, the less snap. Dark chocolate should have a nice crack when you break it. (And it did.)

Aroma: "Take a small piece of chocolate and let it melt between your forefinger and thumb, cup your hand around the chocolate and then smell." (Oops. It was not because these instructions were confusing that I omitted this step. It was because my teeth wanted to see whether the chocolate would crack. Will try to remember this step next time and to apply some of the words used to describe the aroma -- anything from earthy to fruity to wine, toasted nuts or floral.)

Mouthfeel: I had trouble with this one too. They suggest pinching your nose during the first bite in order to "let your tongue and mouth isolate the chocolate" at the front of the mouth where the tastebuds predominate. For me smell is entirely wrapped up in taste, so I kept cheating quickly on this one. What to pay attention to here included the hint of flavours and how long these last. Apparently the flavour should "steadily rise and linger" -- and some fine dark chocolates can linger up to 45 minutes. Also, the finest chocolates will produce a series of flavours. (This last part I found to be true, especially for the darker chocolates.)

Flavour: "The basic flavours are acidity, bitterness, sweetness and astringency." (Hm. I wasn't able to distinguish between acidity and astringency, at least not enough to know to identify them.)

The process reminded me of watching the ballet -- I almost never keep track of the storyline at the ballet because I'm so dazzled by the beauty of each movement and the exquisite dancers. Here, it was challenging to articulate what specifically I liked or didn't like about each kind of chocolate.

I have to confess that I let one of my kids taste with me. We discussed our reactions. He found the dark chocolate too intense; it was probably my favourite. We both really liked the hazelnut truffle -- unlike, say, Nutella or a Ferrero Rocher chocolate, here the chocolate dominates nicely and is complemented by the hazelnut. He liked the almond chocolate -- I could barely taste the chocolate, although I thought the almonds were nice. We both were dazzled by the milk chocolate with spiced cookies: it had a crunchy texture from the cookies and the flavours were, ahem, divine together. We agreed it was something we could eat at any time of the year. We also both agreed that we kind of wished for a white chocolate with crushed candycanes in it, as another holiday flavour.

I'm not sure I was particularly good at testing, but I imagine I could get excellent if given more opportunity. To which I am very much open. Because I am nothing if not about learning. Especially when it comes to chocolate.

(PS Divine didn't ask us to post anything publicly -- they just wanted our opinions)

Sweet Moments Don't End

2011-10-16T20:59:00.005-04:00

I used to keep a calendar where I made notes of all my kids' milestones, cute sayings, and challenges. Every six months, I would transfer the best of these into their baby books. As they got older, their milestones were less recognizable, but I still sat (and sit!) down twice a year to write a snapshot of where they are at at that moment. As I look back, there are many details I would remember no other way.

And yet, so much gets lost along the way. This weekend, a few sweet or hilarious moments stood out to me:

- On a walk, we crossed a bridge and started talking about the Billy Goats Gruff. "What I never got," said my crafty middle child. "was why the biggest Billy Goat Gruff didn't claim a fourth, bigger brother."

- My mall rat daughter spent five solid hours in the mall with a friend, the girl's mom and sister. (I escaped!) She bought two items with birthday money -- one at 40% off, both totally her style - and had a great time. Same daughter had a friend over on Friday afterschool and they cut out fleece to make knotted baby blankets, which they will sell in two weeks, raising money for a refugee family. I'm thrilled that they've adopted my plan, at their willingness to work hard for others, but I had to giggle at the following scene: The three of us - me, daughter and friend - cross-legged on the basement floor, sawing at fleece with semi-dull scissors, Adele belting it out in the background. Suddenly, apropos of nothing I could determine, Friend says, "Isn't gravy the best?" and daughter agreed, "I just love gravy." Sawing resumed.

There were more moments. I meant to capture one per child, give you some nice symmetry and a glimpse into the quiet sweet moments of life. But life got busy and two kids fell sick, and football playoffs happened and the dog needed to be walked again.

I'm reading a book I need to read these days. It's by a local author and it's called One Thousand Gifts. She writes beautifully and honestly and it's all centred around one epiphany in her life: the transformative power of gratitude, which is preceded by the discipline of noticing and awareness. Which is what I did with these great kids of mine, and what I've been consciously trying to do lately when I'm walking the dog.

The first day I made a point to do this I saw a leaf suspended in midair over a driveway. I'm pretty sure it had caught on a strand of spider web, but it was really cool. I wonder how long it withstood the wind. Yesterday I was walking the pup again and watched as the wind caught, just right, the three cloth ghosts that are standing as seasonal sentinels outside my neighbour's house -- they shivered like Scooby Doo ghosts in the wind, and then one swayed and righted itself. Perfect.

I can't tell you how easy it is in the midst of this life that is too busy for the likes of me to forget to pay attention, to focus instead on the next thing that needs to happen. I can tell you how taxing that posture is and how refreshing it is to pay attention, to find the still point of the turning world.

Steve Jobs, A Dead Cat and a Kidnapped Peacemaker

2011-10-12T15:16:00.005-04:00

I know, I know. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. They should walk into a bar. But instead they walked into my life, inspiring and transforming it.

I'll start with the cat. Six months ago, my beloved Eleuthera died. As I've written about here, I had created a wicked persona for that cat, complete with cat swearing and wildness. When she died, I missed her but I realized I also missed the opportunity she offered me to be creative and witty, playful and slightly irreverent. And then, one day it occurred to me that I didn't have to stop. I didn't have to fit myself into a mould that I only approximately fit.

I had been agonizing about what I was going to be when I grew up (if I grew up) for a good eighteen months. My poor husband. I had talked with consultants, clients, colleagues, friends, postal workers. OK, I exaggerate, but only slightly.

The penny dropped for me one night after the cat died. I had had my epiphany and I was reading a careers-at-midlife book. The book asked the question: if you could do anything, whether they paid you or not, what would you do?

I thought immediately of a book I had reviewed, written by James Loney, one of the Christian Peacemaker Team members who was kidnapped and held in Iraq for months. I don't get paid for my book reviews for the local paper, but I still say it's my best gig -- because I get free books from the arrangement! A couple of weeks after I reviewed Loney's compelling book, he spoke at a local high school where a good friend teaches. She asked him in passing about the experience of having his book out in the world, and the reactions to it. He expressed disappointment that few reviewers "got" what he was trying to say. "In fact," he said, not knowing that my friend was my friend, and she, not knowing that I had written the local review. "Only one reviewer really got it -- and it was the one in your local paper." As a writer myself, I know deeply the importance of someone understanding and receiving what you write. The communication process isn't just one-way: it's not really done until it has been heard/read/received.

So, that night, reading my career book, I knew that what I wanted to do was exactly that: to help people tell their stories well so that they could be received well.

Initially, I did not know precisely what this would look like, but the miracle was this: in an instant, I stopped fretting and started pondering.

It's taken six months of pondering and gestating this baby, and even then, it was almost stillborn. Not long ago, a different opportunity presented itself. There were reasons to say yes to the other opportunity, even after my months of dreaming, finding a name, doing market research, working on a logo and a website, talking with potential associates, and -- good grief -- even meeting with an accountant!

And that's when Steve Jobs stepped in. I was waffling last week - setting up a bank account for my new company and at the same time considering this other opportunity. (Let me note, as an aside, that waffles are far tastier than waffling.) Stay hungry, stay foolish, the man said. Look in the mirror and ask yourself: if this were my last day, is this what I would choose to do? Don't live someone else's life.

I let go of the other opportunity and heaved a sigh of relief. Then I rolled up my sleeves and got to work -- on my work.

And so, the big reveal. I'd like to introduce you to my soon-to-be-fledged company: Storywell.

The purpose of this company is to help individuals and organizations tell their stories well. Whether that means working with someone writing their memoirs, helping them polish, shape and find the right words; or whether it means offering an editorial review (a pre-published book review) to a fiction writer; or helping a not-for-profit create a teachers' guide or a newsletter -- I'd like to help you. I am in the process of pulling together a team of associates who will work with clients, but what I am most excited about is connecting people together and helping them become better at expressing themselves and their stories.

My official launch will be January 1 and I'm planning a fun networking event later in January (because goodness, January needs some fun!) but it's already starting -- the website will be up soon at storywell.ca -- and I wanted to let you know what I'm up to.

Mall Rats

2011-10-06T13:59:00.003-04:00

Some of my kids' best -- and worst -- qualities can neither be tied directly to nature or nurture. Like my eldest's astonishing ability with money. That one was not inherited from either parent, although I'm grateful for it.

I'm much less grateful for our daughter's growing penchant for going to the mall with her friends.

Let me be clear: I like buying. I like grocery shopping because you never go to the grocery store just to browse. You go with intention and appetite, and you leave with bags of food. You might discover fun delicacies along the way, but really you know what you've come for. I like incidental Christmas shopping, whereby I keep in mind the people I need to buy for and randomly pick up gifts throughout the year when I find the perfect item. And, my dislike for malls has something to do with the fact that my back gets tired and easily sore when I walk too long on polished floors. But, even as I look back to my misspent youth, shopping was not a major feature.

I will also say that my daughter is a good shopper. She makes great choices, has fabulous taste and gets how a budget works. She has learned not to beg or whine along the way. She comes home empty-handed more often than not.

It's the lurking in the palaces of conspicuous consumption that I don't like. I remember when Chapters opened up in our city and lots of people made it a destination, to get a cup of coffee and browse for books. Or Ikea. Plenty of folks I know make Ikea a wandering destination.

People: a park is a wandering destination. Climb a mountain. Sit by the lake. Walk along the beach. Hold hands with a toddler and take an hour to walk a city block. Take a trail. Ride your bike.

A store is a place to buy things. When you need things, you go. When you don't, you live your life.

Yesterday, I dropped her off at school. She and her friends talked and then ran back to me. "Can I go to the mall this week?" she asked. I started to shake my head. "You don't need anything." "But I haven't been to the mall in two or three weeks!"

I surveyed the crowd. "Tell me why you don't want to be a mall rat," I asked. They all shrugged. They DID want to be mall rats. You can get feathers woven into your hair at the mall.

As the dog and I walked home, I thought about this and I tried to be fair. I know what appeals to her about shopping: it's a bit of freedom with your friends. It's the hunt for something novel and interesting. It's finding ways to express who you are through clothes. But I used to volunteer at Ten Thousand Villages and one of the things I learned there is that it's pretty much as much fun helping someone else choose something for their occasion as it is finding something for your own.

By the time I got home, I had concocted a dangerously elaborate plan: I would herd the group of mall rats to my house, teach them how to make fun crafts (they could even buy the supplies together! with my seed capital!) Then they would sell the crafts at my friend's Christmas bazaar. The funds they raised they could use for a shopping trip to the mall -- with a twist. Instead of buying for themselves, they could buy clothes, toys and gifts for a family in need. I contacted a friend who works with refugees - she has two families who came to Canada with the clothes on their backs. Bingo!

I said the plan was dangerously elaborate because it was a bit like a Jenga tower: one misstep in how I communicated this to my daughter and the whole thing could fall flat. After school, we sat in the backyard and I asked her to listen to the whole idea before she came to a conclusion. I told her she and her friends could adapt the plan, make it their own - that they didn't need to do my idea exactly. She listened and nodded. "I like it, Mom," she said. "Except I think my friends and I should keep the money for ourselves and go shopping."

[Insert sound of head banging on table here.]

All I said was that I wouldn't provide the seed capital in that case. I read her the profiles of the families. I said we could talk about it again later.

But I'm kind of perplexed. I haven't wanted to be one of those parents who insists on food bank donations in lieu of birthday party gifts, but we have tried to model generosity and compassion in a variety of ways. I know that a tween who wants to go to the mall with her friends is more typical than not, so it's not that I'm disturbed by this. I just wish I could shift the balance a little. Truly, she does not need one more skinny teeshirt in her drawer, and there are kids in our city who have only the clothes on their backs.

I'm just wondering how we get from here to there. Thoughts?

Popularity

2011-10-05T10:18:00.004-04:00

My siblings and I always used to say that our sister Heather was our parents' favourite but that was okay with us, because she was our favourite too.

I kind of feel that way today. Erin Bow is both a member of my writers' group and the newly chosen 2011 winner of the TD Canadian Children's Book Award for her debut young adult novel Plain Kate. I gather that some writers' groups are hotbeds of jealousy and one-upmanship. Not ours. I will freely admit to moments of envy but they are vastly, vastly swamped by a deep sense of community and clan. I'm so deeply proud of Erin and in awe of her abilities to go to dark places in the most unflinching of ways and to create bright spells of hope and humour in the midst, while wordsmithing in the most jaw-droppingly beautiful way. While the rest of the writers in our group are enjoying small successes and kind rejections, Erin is being swept along -- but we understand exactly why, and we're having fun being bridesmaids next to her.

Popularity is a curious thing. Last night, my grade nine son talked about how he's straddling two worlds -- the smart geeks and the popular kids - and how he doesn't want to be the coolest kid at the geek table or the geekiest kid at the cool table. He's pretty sure, and so am I, that he'll work this out, but it is the perennial high school dilemma that continues to play its way out for the rest of our lives too.

For writers, this sometimes means figuring out whether you'll write what sells or write what is in your heart and mind. When those overlap and when there is brilliance, you have Erin. Actually Erin's success sustains me some days because it's a relief to know that in these days where publishers and book chains and independents are failing, excellence still finds a place in the catalogues, on the shelves and at the award ceremonies. It inspires me to work harder.

At the same time, I remembered my own high school experience last night and I told my son that I had never been willing to pay the price of popularity. I know a lot of people who lurked at the margins of their high school (their workplace, their university residence, their neighbourhood), noses pressed against the glass of popularity, wishing they could get in. Not me. I sort of always believed it was a choice -- that if I really wanted, I could morph into the Popular Girl. That gave (and gives) me a peculiar contentment. I'm not willing to mask or cut off parts of me in order to fit into the popular crowd.

Some people just have "It." Our middle son does. Erin does. For some people, it's not a matter of making a choice -- they just are popular because everyone wants what they have to offer, because what they offer is just awesome. Certainly not everyone who is popular is a sellout. Some are the most authentic and original of all.

And that's what should -- and did last night -- receive the prize.

October Rambling

2011-10-03T10:47:00.003-04:00

"She was never going to be the most beautiful woman in the room" - novelist Louise Penny writes of a minor character - "[but she] was alive."

I'm alive. After this past week, that feels like more than a bit of an accomplishment. During this last week, we juggled my nephew's heart surgery, helping out at my great uncle's funeral in London, and emceeing a wedding in Ottawa. Oh, and the diamond falling out of my engagement ring (found it!), the kennel losing our dog's reservation (found another one!), grade nine parent night, a potential football concussion, and all the normal detritus of family and work life.

Surgery went well - although the weight of it hung heavy even though we were at a distance. The funeral was fitting - despite the fact that I confused the deceased with his brother and did a doubletake when the living brother walked toward me.

Our drive to Ottawa was beautiful but it wasn't pretty. Our kids had been too excited to sleep much before midnight the night before. We had heard that the leaves in Algonquin Park were at their absolute peak this weekend and we - perhaps foolishly - decided to take the road less traveled, effectively doubling our drive time to nine hours. Thank heavens it was spectacular and that the rain was only intermittent. We got to stop at Webers for burgers, to show the kids our honeymoon place just outside Huntsville, and look at amazingly colourful vistas. We also got to endure Much Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth. I had loaded new music into my iPod and since it was, after all, Friday, I decided to include the infamous Rebecca Black song. Which my kids promptly declared verboten. Later in the day when the fighting became intense, I threatened to play the song again; that's when the tears started again.

The next day, they were even wearier from the journey. We went over to Gatineau Park in Quebec (I blew kisses to my beloved belle province from the hotel window -- and I'm not ashamed to admit it) and hiked around the meromictic Pink Lake. Meromictic apparently means a lake where seasonal mixing of the water from the top and bottom does not occur and so the bottom of the lake is oxygen-free, in part because of geology (the cliffs surrounding the lake shelter it from mixing winds), and in part because the water at the bottom is heavier than the rest. Apparently the stuff at the bottom, only 20 metres down, hasn't had a good breath of oxygen for 10,000 years, and the lake is home to prehistoric creatures. These facts and the fascinating way the wind rippled the surface of the water in a variety of directions caused our middle child to create a lengthy science fiction story about Homo Aquatic Man, who lived in the lake, and who came up to take a breath every 10,000 years, sucking all the air out of the valley. The story was detailed and was embellished as we walked the three kilometres of paths around the lake. It was around the time that we spotted flakes of mica on the path and the deep caves beside the path (mica mines from the early 20th century, apparently) that the energy of our youngest started to flag in earnest. We could see, directly across the lake the place where we had started - it would take just as long to get back either way. By the time we reached our final stretch, I was hoping Homo Aquatic Man might consider taking her for his own.

After a hurried visit to William Lyon Mackenzie King's summer home in the park, we went to the Byward Market, where we picked up lunch, apples, braided garlic and Lush toothpaste tablets (wasabi flavoured!).

By this time, we had a relatively short time to get to the wedding. We parked in the 15-minute parking in front of our hotel, rode up the elevator, threw on clothes and mascare (some of us) and hurried back down with minutes to spare.

The wedding was lovely. It was held in a massive wood-lined, stained-glass Anglican church, with coffee mugs, coat racks and bookshelves lining one side of the church. The church was abuzz with chatter before the service -- it was a rollicking crowd -- and laughter throughout the service. The minister blended tradition with innovation and sincerity, personalizing and sympathizing and adapting to technical glitches. The bride's younger sister, who has intellectual disabilities and is exuberant in her affection, read beautifully about leaning not on your own understanding. The bridesmaids carried sunflowers. The groom and his brother wore kilts in their family tartan. And the bride, whose life has been deeply involved in our family's life for a decade, was happy, as she will be.

When I looked ahead at this week, I was afraid that the weight of all the different events and needs would accumulate and I would be stressed and strained at the reception. We had chosen the emcees at our own wedding because they were fun people, but at the wedding, they turned prim and proper. I could imagine it happening to us. I could also imagine just wanting the whole thing to be over with -- when what I really hoped was that I could enjoy every minute. We planned ahead, so that the weight of the entertainment would not rise and fall on our jokes. We chose small symbolic items and wrapped them, placing one on each table at the reception. We instructed guests to open the gifts and to figure out how their item connected with the bride's story, the groom's story or their shared history. If they told a true, good story, the couple would reward them with a kiss.

I probably should have known when I heard the jocularity at the wedding, the unconventional music, and the bagpipes - I should have known then that we had exactly the right crowd for this activity. Every single table rose to the occasion. True, I had to correct some of the outlandish stories, but it provoked more laughter, community and shared history, and it honoured the bride and groom, rather than embarrassing or humiliating them.

And here's the thing. At the wedding, the minister talked about whether or not Jesus would be fun at a party -- that most would probably consider that having Jesus might put a damper on things, but in reality, the story of Jesus' first miracle was where he was at a wedding and the wine ran out and he turned water into fine wine. At our wedding, lo these 20 years ago, one of the songs we had sung was precisely about this miracle. Some of the lyrics said this: So amidst the laughter and feasting/ There sits Jesus full with the fun.

That's how I felt -- full with the fun. Really, that was a miracle to me after a week of the good, the bad and the ugly. I wasn't -- and was never going to be -- the most beautiful woman in the room, but I was alive. In Penny's novel, a character observing the woman "had come to appreciate how important it was, how very attractive it was, how very rare it was, to be fully alive."

Happy Wedding J & J

2011-09-29T23:27:00.003-04:00

The car is old, second hand and gray or beige. It falls apart at regular intervals, bucks and jerks with faulty spark plugs, makes her cry at the cost of its constant repairs. She needs it in order to work and she works in order to keep it running.

She is just past thirty, sparkling true-blue eyes, rosy cheeks, a tendency to be shocked easily and a fear of poverty. She admits to no fire in the belly but she is a good friend, stalwart and true.

One month before she turned thirty, she shook a fist at the sky, vowed a man would need to be sent to her – a good decent one. He arrives, an online penpal within a matter of weeks. They correspond without speaking for a month before he invites her to his city an hour and a half away for a concert. She nearly refuses. Several friends send her email messages ALL IN CAPS and she agrees to go, nervous.

He invites her to a wedding and they swing-dance, barefooted, outside. They have mutual friends. Not only passion develops but domestic inclinations and sharing of long-held secrets.

He appears at my door at her side in the gloom of a late autumn evening. She sports red antlers and he has an elf hat on. I fold laundry while we all talk and laugh. He looks like a long ago friend from high school, and he likes her a lot. He’s bringing her home to meet his family on the coast over the holidays. Twice he talks of being unashamed: about crying at good movies and about being a longtime Leafs fan. He tells a story of sitting next to a shivering pale teen on a bus – a boy who had ridden two days straight from Winnipeg to Halifax, only to discover it had been a mistake, and so had climbed on the next bus back – and sharing the pillows he had received at Christmas with the boy.

I watch secretly from my window as they leave the next morning. She is already in the car; he is folding his frame into the passenger seat. I see them readying for takeoff, and then one of them remembers something and he gets out and runs back inside, half-bent, eager. He runs out again in the same way, his posture inclining toward her, not wanting to keep her waiting. He buckles up and I watch them turn to each other and kiss, quickly but naturally, a talisman before leaving, before the little gray-beige sedan takes them on their way together.

A Question and A Gift

2011-09-24T15:36:00.003-04:00

I know that the things I write on this blog are kind of self-contained little essays often. I also know that sometimes Google makes responding on this blog difficult. (Sometimes it doesn't even recognize me!). I've been curious though to watch my statistics: the number of readers peaked in May and June, slipped in July, sagged in August and is rebounding later in September. I'm wondering if readers of blogs take a break in the summer too, whether you get out of your regular rhythms and routines. Which is so often a good thing. Summer is a great time to stock the larder and to be out of time. I was wondering if what I wrote had become too self-contained or self-reflective -- a blog all about me, and not something readers could connect with. Maybe that IS it. I'm open to suggestions, either way.

And the gift: two nights this week I made the salad I would ask for if it were my last meal. One of those nights was the night Troy Davis was executed in the US, so I didn't want to be callous and call it Death Row Salad, but really, upon reflection, it is that good. The flavours complement each other in amazing ways. I think you have to like all the flavours individually, but together -- oh baby.

So, to those who've stuck in here past the summer and past the containedness of the writing, a gift -- the recipe for the best salad I know:

Wash a couple of handfuls of baby arugula. Dry it well and spread it gently, like a fleece, on a large salad plate. Drizzle with the finest quality olive oil you can manage. (I love the locally-imported Ralo's olive oil.) Then drizzle with real balsamic vinegar. It costs a fortune. We were fortunate enough to get ours in Italy in a winery that made balsamico in their attic. What we normally get here is balsamic-flavoured wine vinegar. Real balsamic vinegar is thick as oil or maple syrup, and dark-sweet-tart. You need the tiniest amount of this -- which still, I calculate, costs about $5.00 Then grind pepper on top and sprinkle with a wee bit of salt. Finally, grate real Parmigiano-Reggiano (or similar aged cheese like Grana Padano) on top.

It tastes like the deepest tastes of the earth have come together for a celebration. Try not to moan out loud -- I dare you.

Doggone Shame

2011-09-23T09:29:00.004-04:00

In my shellshocked state after getting the puppy this spring, I confessed to my mother that I wasn't a dog person. I was a cat person and this wiggly, demanding ball of fur had invaded my space far more than I had ever expected. At that point, sleep-deprived, I wasn't sure I liked it. Her reply was that there were no dog people or cat people, just animal lovers, and that I could learn to be one. Which I have.

But there are definitely people who are not dog people.

It has surprised me, my inability to predict who will bend down and kiss my dog and who will grimace if the dog shares the same sidewalk square. I've had homeless people, yuppies, tidy toddlers and tottering old people all embrace my little wiggler. And I've had a bony finger waggled in my face, accusing me of cruelty for letting my dog escape my grasp.

This week, the school newsletter came home. On page three was a little note telling families that because of the excess of dog excrement in the school yard, the principal would be calling in the Humane Society to ticket any off-leash dogs.

We live about a hundred steps from the schoolyard. Over the past four months, our nightly routine has shifted to include a walk to the school after supper where our dog roams in a pack of dogs while the owners stand and talk in a circle, throwing toys and sticks to the dogs, pointing out squatting dogs so their owners can clean up after them.

We've met some delightful people this way. There's an tiny eager girl with her tiny eager puppy, some older couples and singles, a university student with her big boxer, a couple with kids a few years older than ours, a retired professor, some work-at-home professionals. It's an enormous leveling ground for people and dogs. There are some dog combinations that work better than others -- the old dogs roll their eyes and bare their teeth at our annoying little puppy, but there are two or three puppies that play at exactly his speed. The little dogs tend to congregate near the soccer posts.

One night he played for almost an hour and a half.

We have commented that getting the puppy is the best thing for our family for previsely this time of day. Laughing at tumbling dogs is the best antidote for a long day of high school. It's more active than sitting in front of the computer or the television and yet doesn't require much more vigilance. Our kids have gotten to know the other owners and dogs too, and we all share milestones of life together, even if we know each other mostly by our dog's names.

Toward the end of the summer, several things started piling up in the schoolyard: garbage, beer bottles and poop piles. Several of us decided we would make a point of cleaning up any of these leftovers. I even gingerly scooped up a condom one day from the yard.

There have been many occasions on which a dog has pooped and the owner goes to find it and can't and so several of us triangulate the area in a way that reminds me of sweeping the lake as a lifeguard. No poop gets left behind.

So, when the letter came home this week, I wasn't sure how to proceed or what to say to my kids. Should we defy the letter and persist in breaking the by-laws? Should we simply take away the delight of our dog's day? I decided I needed to talk to the school a bit more.

Yesterday morning, I ran into the school custodian while walking Lucky and he turned out to be a dog lover, snuggling into him. I mentioned that dogs had become public enemy number one, and he said that nearly every day since school had started, a child had come into the office with dog poop on him or her.

Last evening, I found myself walking beside the principal at the school open house and talked with her about it, wondering how we might work together. Apparently there is no working together on this.

This is where I get torn: a schoolyard is for the school children. School children should not have to dodge dog patties or the illnesses associated with them. And yet, the only solution the principal had to offer was for us to drive across the city to a dog park. We have one car and three children in programs: this isn't always feasible. Nor do I want to be a 'pet parent' who takes my pet child to activities. I have to think that there are more creative solutions: one school parent friend who has a dog (and who probably lives forty steps from the school) suggests that the school ask the pet owners to help weed the overgrown gardens, five minutes each day. I love that idea. I also love the idea of encouraging community between people who might never talk otherwise, and encouraging fresh air and physical activity.

The principal and I found one point of agreement: a few bad apples had spoiled the bunch. I know that there are people who walk their dogs in the yard after dark -- I've heard them -- and I am quite certain that these are the culprits, simply because the schoolyard is completely unlit: how could you ever see to stoop and scoop? But that's not when the Humane Society will come, the principal said.

When the Humane Society comes at dusk, though, they'll see a responsible group of laughing people, talking about their day, their dogs, their lives, stooping and scooping. And they'll ticket them anyhow.

Taking off the Hair Shirt

2011-09-20T10:57:00.003-04:00

So this morning, I put on my hair shirt. I got it out last night but this cold morning, I snuggled into it.

Last night, my daughter told me about someone she knows who has "no flaws." I asked about this person and she told me her friend has to go to bed around sunset, isn't allowed to watch scary movies or use technology. "I'd hate to be in that family," she said. "Yeah," I replied. "We make sure you have lots of flaws."

Then this morning, I happened upon a mommy blog, filled with sunlit photos of Meaningful Family Moments, captured by a Mom Who Cares. There were complicated but oh-so-healthy recipes on the same blog. And, that's when I put on the hair shirt.

And wondered if and when I make other people do the same.

I thought about the fact that I could compare myself to the Coke-in-the-baby-bottle parents and feel pretty good.

But really and truly, each one of us has a different skill set, heritage, set of genes, financial reality, psychological issues, gifts, talents and struggles. Some have the situation they hoped for - and many do not.

I have long loved the rabbinic saying that says, when you die, you will not be asked 'why were you not Moses?', but 'why were you not you?'

I find it hard sometimes to know what good parenting looks like as my kids get older. And I think that's why the blog got me this morning -- because that mommy did the kinds of things I used to do when my kids were small. Now, they go off in three different directions and my job is to provide a landing spot for their return, a listening ear, a cheering voice. It's very very different.

At the end of the summer, I had my melancholy regrets about the things we didn't do, as well as happy memories about the things we did. And then it occurred to me that really and truly, most of all, my job is to love these kids and help them feel loved, and that's all.

And maybe that's what it means to fulfil the rabbinic saying too, to love the people around you -- and yourself too -- in whatever ways you can.

The sun's out now, warming up the rain-drenched, chilly world. I think it's warm enough now to dare to take off the hair shirt and to sit awhile in the sunshine.

September Stuff

2011-09-13T10:39:00.003-04:00

Things I'm thinking about this week

- A really big thing I've been thinking about is the affection I lavish on my puppy when there are so many children in the world in need of love and care. The other morning, I was walking the pup at the schoolyard an hour before school started and there was a child sitting on the swings, aimlessly. The story behind that is probably a working parent with an early meeting, but there I was, playing with my puppy. The dog eats a kibble that is made of salmon, apples and steel cut oats. And yet, famine in the Horn of Africa haunts me. I'm not sure it's either/or but I'm trying to think about how to respond to these promptings.

- Soccer season is finally over. Soccer season is almost never over for us because two of our kids have played year round for the last couple of years. But they've decided to take the winter off, and to play at a house league level from now on. As much as I enjoy watching them grow in skills and have fun playing, I will freely admit I am glad to have a break.

- Football season has begun. I should also note that football overlapped with soccer for a week. One of our sons has made the junior high school football team. In all the papers I signed, I looked for the guarantee that he will not get badly hurt but couldn't find it. Our younger son has made the cuts for his team too -- he'll find out the final decision today. I'm looking forward to this new sport for a variety of reasons -- one of which being that the practices and games are all after school: we get back our family suppers again!!

- Someone last week talked to me about the difference between publishing what sells and what should be sold. I find that oddly encouraging.

- I used to drive the 401 in Toronto every single day to and from work. That was almost 20 years ago. I've come to the decision that that is not something I do anymore. I find the multiple lanes daunting. I have to be in Toronto this weekend though, with the kids, and Dave is not available to join us. We're taking the train. I've decided that it's fine to say I won't drive and that there are ways to maintain my independence and mobility with the use of public transit. The kids think it's far more fun anyhow, and I actually agree.

- I'm really grateful for the kids being back in school and all settled well. With Dave working this summer, I arranged work hours for myself in July, but then we went away in August and after that, I had so many domestic responsibilities (Canning! Indoor shoes! Eye doctor! Dentist! Canning!) that my work slid off the table for a few weeks. Last week, I plunged in by necessity and got rid of the backlog. I feel so much better as a result.

- The liquid pool cover we bought this year to replace our solar blanket was extremely ineffective. It has shortened our swim season a lot. We were told it had been developed in Australia and tested in Arizona and that it would reduce both evaporation and heat loss by something like 90%. Um, no. The cool nights in August caused the temperature to plunge. We've only really taken quick dips for the last month, which feels like a terrible waste.

- Oh, and I finally sent a letter to our family doctor about our experience with Megan's sickness this spring. I never used the word negligence, but I'm still a bit uncertain about how the letter will be received. I'm hoping that expressing our concerns will lead to resolution and ideally apologies. I'm afraid we might get no response at all.

How about you? What's on your mind?

Living with Weeds

2011-09-04T16:33:00.003-04:00

Maybe I've never told the story here. When we bought our house, there was a hole in the roof that let rain in, every surface was covered with wallpaper and/or mould, and the garden was a tangle of vines and goldenrod. We excavated with the help of many friends, family and contractors. It took a matter of many months and one herniated disk.

I think it was a year and a half later that we noticed that part of the back lawn -- about the size of a bathtub - was filled with little scalloped leaved and purple flowered weeds. The next time we looked, the entire back lawn -- the size of, oh, eighty bathtubs -- had been taken over by this same weed.

We called in the "Let's Curb Pesticides!" people (yes, that's their real name) for an evaluation. Their diagnosis: creeping charlie. Their prescription: mow the lawn down to nothingness, saturate with water and cover with tarps. Anything else would simply send the weeds into temporary hiding. So, we did as we were bid and soon our lawn was a patchwork of blue and black tarps.

Two weeks later, the tarps began to rise. Or so I thought. A week later, I was certain and peeked underneath to see a Thriving Crop of Creeping Charlie growing merrily away. The Let's Curb Pesticides people returned, shook their heads and said there was a time and a place for pesticide.

We hired the pesticide people who came and sprayed and killed every last thing in the yard. They recommended we sod instead of seed, because that gave a thick matting that would discourage any errant seeds or spores from making it through. There were no guarantees.

It's four years later now. Often as I weed the dreaded rock garden adjacent to the former home of Creeping Charlie, I find a tendril of the enemy lurking among a couple of plants.

"CHUCK!" I cursed the first time I found the rogue. And the second and the third.

Today, I was weeding the garden and the lawn and I found some again, but today I didn't yell. I just found what I could and rooted it out. You see, it made me think of two things: one, a friend and two, a sermon.

The friend is living with cancer, and has been for almost fifteen years, on and off. The sermon, this morning,was about sin.

Surprisingly sin is not talked about much in church these days, at least not the churches I've been in. It's a bit awkward, sounds judgmental, I guess. But that's not my spin on it. I find the concept of sin an enormous relief. Because like my garden and my friend, I am riddled with this thing I don't want in me, this thing I can't be rid of no matter how much I blast at it and try. To me, the relief of the church naming something as sin is that the cancers in me, or even the weeds, aren't something I can root out myself. They're woven into me. And I don't think sin in the Bible should ever be the end of the story, but only the beginning -- I'm reminded of Douglas Coupland's Generation X where he writes, "My secret is, I need God."

I can't make myself well. I can't root out every last weed. All I can do is need the One who can root it out or let it be, and gently remove the weeds I can find.

End of Summer

2011-09-02T12:13:00.003-04:00

The things we didn't get done. The wasps. The futility of weeding. The anxiety rises about new schools and new classes. Far. Too. Much. Canning. Back to school shopping. Last minute appointments. Aching for peace and quiet. Not wanting to wish the summer away. The days grow perceptibly shorter. The pool is cold and strewn with fallen leaves.

I've never been exactly fond of the end of August and the beginning of September. It's melancholy and crazy-busy at the same time. My different and distinct roles pull me in different directions at the same time. We have to be prepared to hit the ground running once school starts. It reminds me of going from a meandering sideroad onto an extremely short on-ramp to an 8-lane highway.

It's been a good summer, if a different one. Dave worked all summer, for the first time in our marriage, and I felt his absence in a variety of ways: chiefly, in the lack of time to myself and the lack of progress on household tasks. We didn't go to Quebec and we missed it, but we had a lovely time in New York. That lovely time feels like a patch of clear blue sky or a touchstone of goodness. We have a puppy now - and that has changed our routines and considerations a great deal.

The summer holidays are ending with heat and humidity - and around here, emotions are flaring too. One is developing aches and pains, while another was in tears and still another is louder than usual and a bit goofy. We had eye doctor appointments at 9:30 this morning -- it was a kind of dry run for school and it was good we had the practice. We needed it.

But September brings new beginnings too: new schools, new work, new routines, new lessons, new possibilities. Fresh pencils. Shiny shoes. Tart crisp apples. Sweaters and fireplaces. Cozy sheets at night. Coming home to supper together. The comfort of routines.

How is it that I hate the end, and love the new start, all at the same time?

Standing with the Dreamers

2011-08-22T13:13:00.003-04:00

I was planting my fall crops today in my garden - arugula, peas and lettuce. The sun beat down warmly on my back and I was making rows between lush tomato plants, full with ripening fruit. Believe me, I did not want to think about the fact that fall approaches, that if I don't plant now, I won't have a fall harvest.

I was also thinking about the sorrowful news of Jack Layton's early death and all the comments I've read from people who deeply admired Layton and yet disagreed with his politics. Today is a day for grieving, I told myself, not politics. But the lessons of the garden - the need to acknowledge that the end will come - intruded into my political thoughts too.

Jack Layton was a bright man. Elizabeth May is similarly admired and has a keen intelligence. Both of them are or were aware of other political possibilities -- and yet chose to focus their political careers and work in what many would dismiss as idealism. And yet, as we watch dictatorship after dictatorship fall from a deep desire for human rights and equality, and as we see clear evidence for climate change mount, why is it that we continue to smile pleasantly at the good intentions of leaders like May and Layton, and cast our votes elsewhere, shoring up our own resources and leaving the climate and the poor to fend for themselves?

The end comes, whether sooner or later. In a world where multimillion dollar celebrity weddings dominate the news, there are still true heroes, good men and women who strive to affect profound change in the world. I guess the question I would raise today is whether your political party, your place of worship, your family, your life -- and mine -- are making a positive difference in the world, particularly for those who can't help themselves? Is what you choose something that is ultimately admirable when the end comes, or something merely expedient, prudent, and reasonable?

One of my favourite book series is CS Lewis' Narnia books. In one - The Silver Chair - a dismal and aptly named character Puddleglum responds to a cynical challenge about the existence of hope and a saviour, with this: "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things.... Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

So, I cast my lot with the dreamers and I hope you do too. I hope if you admire Jack Layton (or Elizabeth May or Aslan or Jesus) that you try on their dreams, even just a little bit. See how they fit.

Things We Hold Close

2011-08-21T23:12:00.004-04:00

In the bath tonight, I was thinking about this blog and about our trip last week and whether I was eager to describe it or eager to hold it in my heart. And, I'm a bit torn. Sometimes the telling of a true story diminishes the experience to the words used to tell it, takes the whole sights and sounds and smells and tastes and feelings of an experience and reduces them to sound bytes. (It's funny that fiction often does the opposite - unfolds a world with only words.) I really would hate to do that to such a nice holiday.

I will say that it really was nice. That I just love spending time with my own little family, unplugged from technology, exploring brand new places. That our puppy was brilliant on long car drives and steep hikes up mountainsides and along highway roads and in power failures and a train caboose. That perhaps the funniest moment was when we found a gluten- and dairy-free pudding-like dessert for our daughter, in a hippy-dippy co-op grocery store, and she later declared that its coconut milk/orange water/rice milk/roasted coconut flavour and texture was pretty much that of sunscreen. I had tasted it before and tasted it again after - and cracked up laughing because it was exactly sunscreen. A close second for funny was our visit to the state fair's demolition derby. Oh, and there was incredible beauty. And it was pretty much as good as going to Quebec (and if you know me, you know that's saying a lot).

I was thinking about things that should be held close, pondered in the heart, not spilled out for public consumption. I have a few ideas -- anything that happens in a master bedroom, undeveloped story ideas, other people's secrets, for instance -- but I'd like to hear your ideas. What do you hold close? What improves in the telling? What is diminished by sharing?

Wedding Songs

2011-08-10T16:23:00.003-04:00

Twenty years ago today was our wedding. It was back in the day, kids, before bridezillas and only-strapless wedding dresses. There are things I would do differently today, things that went wrong that day - but as we walked for coffee this morning, we remembered that the chief feelings of the day were joy and delight.

Not every day since has been so light-filled, and the last year in particular has had its hardships, but it's still a great life and I'm very thankful to share and create it with Dave.

Here are the two songs we had sung at our wedding:

Lord of light, oh come to this wedding
Take the doubt and darkness away
Turn the water of lifeless living
To the wine of gladness we pray

Mother Mary's gently requesting
That you might do whatever you can
Though she may be impatient she loves you
And so she asks what she can't understand

Lord of light, oh come to this wedding
Take the doubt and darkness away
Turn the water of lifeless living
To the wine of gladness we pray

So amidst the laughter and feasting
There sits Jesus full with the fun
He has made them wine because He is longing
For a wedding that's yet to come.

and

There is a joy in the journey
There's a light we can love on the way
There is a wonder and wildness to life
And freedom for those who obey

And all those who seek it shall find it
A pardon for all who believe
Hope for the hopeless and sight for the blind

To all who've been born in the Spirit
And who share incarnation with Him
Who belong to eternity stranded in time
And weary of struggling with sin

Forget not the hope that's before you
And never stop counting the cost
Remember the hopelessness when you were lost

There is a joy in the journey
There's a light we can love on the way
There is a wonder and wildness to life
And freedom for those who obey

And freedom for those who obey...

Cooking for One

2011-08-09T15:26:00.002-04:00

You may recall that our daughter had a wretched flu this winter, followed by months of stomach pains and vomiting. (And, incidentally, that aside from poking her to determine it wasn't appendicitis, the medical system failed her utterly and that we ended up in the care of a naturopath.)

Blood allergy tests done by the naturopath determined that a variety of foods were causing significant inflammation in her system. We were told to avoid these foods for a three month period, without being obsessive about it.

She went off wheat, dairy, sugar, eggs and peanuts.

A lot of people have been aghast at this diet. "What CAN she eat?" they say. A doctor in our life pooh-poohed the diet as unnecessary. But here's what I know: she missed a total of a month of school before we changed her diet, and now she feels like a million bucks.

We're through the initial three month period now, so we're at the point of reintroducing foods gradually. As we do this, I've been reflecting on the entire experience.

The new diet honestly hasn't been very hard for me to do. I have a huge jug of maple syrup in the fridge and I substitute it for sugar in baking. I've learned to eyeball recipes for moistness, as obviously syrup is wetter than sugar, and to adapt on the fly. There are more than decent flour substitutes out there. We've tested out different nut butters and her favourite is an almond-hazelnut butter. She was mostly off dairy before this started. We buy gallons of rice milk, which is tastier than cow milk and is fortified with vitamins and minerals to have the same good effects as dairy. We haven't found a decent cheese substitute (they all kind of taste like margarine and melt like plastic) but a sprinkle of parmesan has not thrown her off her diet. I still use eggs in baking, but she doesn't eat omelets or anything egg based. We eat pad thai, rice-based dishes, potatoes. She has a red lentil pasta which, if prepared correctly, actually tastes better than wheat pasta (something I can't say for rice or corn pasta). There's more she can eat than can't eat. While she was away at camp recently, we decided to eat everything we couldn't eat when she's here - and we ran out of ideas after four days.

All takes is a bit of a bigger food budget and mindfulness.

I realized this a couple of weeks ago when we were at someone else's house and were served wheat and dairy at every turn, even though this person knew of her diet's needs. That was a sparse meal for my girlie. And the other day I stood in line at Starbucks and realized there wasn't one thing available, other than possibly juice, on their menu that she could have. I have to think ahead. I sent her to camp with three full grocery bags of food.

I've been proud of my daughter in all of this. The kid has an intense sweet tooth and was accustomed to having peanut butter on toast for breakfast. She's adapted without self-pity or complaint -- because she feels great! I've tried really hard to normalize the experience for her too - finding treats she can have, cooking the same meal for all of us so she doesn't have to ask whether the food is okay for her. But the biggest part is how good she feels.

So, it's with both trepidation and a bit of a shrug that I'm reintroducing the foods that caused the problems. I don't relish the idea of her missing more school and us missing more sleep as we help her - especially when it hasn't been that hard to adapt. Our goal is just to know where she can cheat - can she participate in pizza day at school? does she need to be vigilant at parties? do I have to bring substitute foods? can we go through the Tim Hortons drive-thru?

The biggest thing I'm realizing is where the challenge has been for us in this. Adapting our diet has been a piece of wheat-, dairy- and sugar-free cake for me -- particularly compared to the enormous stress of not knowing what was going on in her body and not having adequate medical support in the process. THAT was more difficult than I can say. This only takes creativity.

Good health is something we all take for granted, until it's compromised. And that's the value of good health care professionals: they help us achieve and maintain good health. So, to our doctor and her receptionist who blocked us: please don't do this to another family. And to the naturopath who listened and supported us: thank you from the bottom of our guts.

Where we live and work and love

2011-08-03T16:50:00.003-04:00

We have squirrels or birds or something that chatters in our trees and sound remarkably like monkeys. Which reminds me - I have monkey mind this summer. My mind dances from one thing to another. My weeks dance from one thing to another. There are no two weeks alike this summer, when it comes to combination of people and activities.

Last Friday, Dave and I took our daughter to pick blueberries. While we picked, we overheard a conversation between the farmer and a local who was there to pick. Apparently someone had set up a vegetable stand outside a restaurant in the small blink-and-you'll-miss-it hamlet, selling vegetables that were available inside the store next door, which was owned by "Mary's son-in-law." The real kicker was that even though the vegetable seller advertised Local Corn, the seller wasn't even local -- he was from the town five kilometres away. We, who had driven twenty minutes from the city, snickered in our pails, even as we understood his concern.

Last weekend, Dave took us all into the new Perimeter Institute building and toured the kids around while I sat in the gorgeous restaurant, drinking cappucino and reading the newest New Yorker. I found a profile of Jaron Lanier. Interestingly, I had heard Lanier speak as part of a panel in the very same building, in the room next to the one I was sitting in, a couple of years before. He was the guy who popularized the idea of virtual reality and somehow he really fascinated me. The article gave me a glimpse of his peripatetic life and also informed me that he had a book out - one which really evaluated social media and the way it constricted and changed relationships. I looked the book up when I got home, and looked for ways to buy it secondhand. It was available at our local great used books store, Old Goat Books. (Cue: It's a small world...)

The next day, we hosted a wedding shower at our house. One of the guests is someone I know via the bride, but he doesn't know my family. Except that he commented during the shower that he felt he knew my son through my Facebook postings about him, the same way you might "know" a celebrity. Yesterday, walking uptown, I ran into a new Facebook friend who lives in my neighbourhood and we walked home together. We met as friends of friends on Facebook and we got talking about all that we had learned about one another through social media - even though we live only four blocks apart. Both of these encounters made me wonder exactly what will happen when I read Lanier's book, which is called You Are Not a Gadget.

I'm hoping to read the book - to savour it actually - next week when we're on holidays. Holidays! Holidays! But unlike most of our holidays over the last decade, we are not heading east past Quebec City to my beloved Gaspe. The combination of having to take a puppy on a 14-hour car ride through Montreal and my sister having enough to cope with in her immediate family meant that we have had to make other plans. We're going to explore New York state - avec le petit chien. (My family promises I'm allowed to speak French in private on this trip. But NOT in public, Mom!) The Gaspe is also where I've lived for the last eight years in my fiction. I've written three novels set in a fictional Gaspesian town. And now they are done. I would like to spend some of our holidays writing something new, but it's been extremely hard to start something new. My heart is still pretty attached to that place. I have three distinct writing ideas, all of which interest me, and none of which stand out among the rest. There are days when it feels like being drawn and quartered -- only I'm only pulled in the three directions. One day, I actually wrote the projects on three little slips of paper, folded them up and picked one at random to work on. And I did, but it takes me a while to get into a new fictional world and I miss the familiarity of being able to slide into my usual French village.

And so, monkey mind. Except, if you -- or I - look carefully at all of this, it really isn't just a jumble. There's an element to it that's a little Jackson Pollock -- and here the fractal patterns have to do with place and knowledge and where we live and work and love.

Beautiful Little Weeds

2011-07-26T10:03:00.003-04:00

The cicadas were screaming at 8:30 in the morning. The dog was trying to stick to the shade, but he still had energy and needed to be walked. My eyes were looking down, mostly keeping an eye on his movements, but also averted from the sun's glare. The ground, I saw, was baked and the grass was fried to a pale tan brown. Only the weeds were still green after a month without rain.

And then I saw them. Little squat, spindly weeds with yellow balls of flowers on them. I have no idea what they're called. I've never seen the flowers open. You'd never plant them in your garden. But they were Proust's madeleines for me on a hazy summer morning.

Because these are weeds I knew well in childhood. I sat in summer day camps at the school yard across from my house, and the counsellors kept us occupied for long hours playing Sleeping Beauty, where we had to lay very still in the grass, while the counsellors walked among our prone bodies, looking for movement. You were out if you moved. A single round could last a half an hour or more.

There was a lot of grass sitting in those days. Grass sitting and lying down in grass. And in the grass were these homely little weeds.

We're well into summer holidays now. My kids all have this entire week off and the heat has broken to beautiful warm sunshine. When the humidity was at its peak last week and the kids were peaky with illness, I let them watch their home decorating shows on television. But today, I'm sending them out to get bored, to get to know the weeds in our yard.

And maybe even for a round or two of Sleeping Beauty.

Intermission

2011-07-21T12:55:00.002-04:00

Hum a little tune to yourself. Your regularly scheduled blog will return soon. We've had a few "technical glitches" this week, chiefly due to seasonal affective disorder, a puppy and a traveling husband. As one of my sisters once said, "I haven't had two minutes to rub together."

- Jobs I am glad I don't have this week: roofer, nursing mother, construction worker, undertaker, lawn mower, garbage collector.

- Places I'd rather be: Geneva with my hubby, Metis sur Mer with my sister, Quebec with Lorilee, a walk-in-refrigerator, February.

- Things I'm grateful for: that I didn't actually set the pool on fire, that the dog was only insane twice this week, air conditioning, that my kids have regained their health, cool breezes, that the grocery store sells bbq chicken, that I picked raspberries before the heat wave got too intense, supper with friends and coffee with my writers' group.

- Things I'm not so grateful for this week: that I took on painting a child's bedroom, that my kids are constitutionally unable to put dishes in the dishwasher, that one soccer coach refused to cancel practice, having to be the sole chauffeur.

- Times I have lost it: once.

So, how about you? Fill this intermission with your answers to the same categories. Thanks! Wishing you a cool breeze wherever you are!

Harry Potter

2011-07-15T22:14:00.003-04:00

The vast majority of the audience were teenagers. One was even dressed in a Hogwarts uniform - short plaid skirt, untucked white blouse, tie. Our teenaged neighbour saw the movie at the midnight screening.

I went with my preteen son, but it must be emphasized that I was not there merely as a chauffeur or a chaperone. (We got there more than a half an hour early. For those who know me, that's like camping out -- I generally arrive with not a moment to spare.)

Our neighbour had told me that she cried four times during the movie. I wondered what might make me cry.

On the way, we talked about a survey that came out today asking who your favourite Harry Potter character was - and wondered aloud who our favourites were. My son voted for Harry. I said, maybe, Neville. The survey said Snape.

The movie did not disappoint. We were taken on a fantastic ride and it was so very well done in every way, probably the best of all the HP films.

And I did cry. I welled up more than a few times, but tears fell down my cheeks at the most unexpected time: when the forces of evil were attacking and Professor McGonagle, Molly Weasley and a small number of other Hogwarts staff and friends stood outside, casting protective spells that spread like an oil slick in the sky to form a bubble over the school. Two things made me cry: one, the sheer beauty of the bubble, and two, that those charged with this act of protection were the moms and dads, the middle aged people. The audience I sat with might have reflected the central characters of the movie - and my neighbour told me later that she cried because they were finished at Hogwarts and she was graduating high school - but there was also a very real place for me in this movie. It wasn't the teenagers who cast this beautiful, protective spell.

I wondered if I felt the weight of this more than usual because less than an hour before the movie began, my husband left for a week in Switzerland. What I hate about him going away is that the mantle of responsibility for the kids comes to rest squarely on my shoulders. I'm the one who must cast the protective spell, in his absence.

But the movie - for all the hue and cry it raised about the perils of witchcraft - reminded me more than anything has recently that there is evil to fight and children to be protected, and that protection can be very beautiful and vulnerable.

The other thing my tears made me think about was my experience with re-reading books. Until I had children, I always identified with the ingenue in a story. I liked the early Anne of Green Gables books. But after having children, I began to shift in my identification. Maybe that sounds obvious - and in one sense it is - but it makes an old, beloved book an utterly new one. It's a bit like shifting from third to first person narration.

I loved Neville in this movie, and I loved Harry and Snape too, but so unexpectedly and so very deeply, my very favourite characters were Minerva McGonagle and Molly Weasley. And, as one charged with the sole care and keeping of my kids for the next week, I am very grateful for the experience that gave me a heroic vision of what I'm doing. It may look like driving to soccer and summer camps, and tucking into bed and making and cleaning up supper, but it's also a larger and deeper role. As Harry learns, he could just go on -- but he could also choose to go back, to engage in the fray and to fight for a new and better world.

I think I'll do the same.

A La Mode

2011-07-13T22:31:00.003-04:00

The fashion kind of mode - not the ice cream kind.

I've decided in recent weeks that I am hopelessly out of fashion. To wit: for the last couple of years, I've had a terrible time finding pantyhose. I can find colourful tights -- and I buy those -- but just not the sheer vaguely skin-toned ones. It never occurred to me that these were dreadfully out of style -- until I read that Kate and Pippa Middleton were bringing sheer hose back into fashion. Someone really should have told me. I get how this works in the summer time, but really, in the winter?

Second case in point: my boys have been insisting on wearing ankle-high white sports socks with everything for the last year or so. Every time I fold their laundry, I cluck to myself that I'm glad I'm raising children who aren't driven by trends, who have no idea how girly and geeky low cut white socks are. Finally one day, we had a conversation about this and it turns out that Mom is wrong, that every kid going is wearing such socks. I go out and buy myself some ankle socks.

Tonight, we're watching our guilty summer pleasure, America's Got Talent, and the host is wearing a white suit, or possibly a pale pink jacket and white pants. I think this is campy until later when I'm reading about a film director at the premiere of Harry Potter, wearing a very of-the-moment white suit.

Really, there should be memos issued. It's not my fault if I don't know, is it? I suppose at the very least I can provide entertainment to the more savvy fashionista masses.

It reminds me of years ago when I was working with university students and they played ABBA. For me, only half a dozen years older than then, ABBA was the music that was on the turntables of the people I babysat for. ABBA and Supertramp. I almost couldn't believe my ears - it had to be some ironic postmodern joke, right? But no. ABBA had become so uncool, it became cool again. And then, Mamma Mia - everyone was into ABBA again!

So, no hose -- or, at least, keep an eye on the Middletons to see how that works for them-- yes to ankle socks, and dress my husband like he's in Saturday Night Fever.

Okay. Got it.

Fumbling Toward Clarity

2011-07-10T15:18:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to think what it's like.

It's kind of like stepping out into a stream, testing with your feet to know whether a rock is stable to stand on. Whether it's smooth and flat, whether it is well-anchored itself, or whether it will land me in the deep, drenched and cold.

It's like feeling around in the dark on my night table, careful not to knock over my eyeglasses or books, trying not to wake anyone, feeling with my fingers for the clock or the glass of water, without using my eyes.

It's like writing a poem or a story, struggling to find the exact word, the perfect way to describe an object or an experience.

It's like twisting the dial on a radio or the manual lens on a camera, with the slightest alteration causing either fuzziness or clarity.

I'm in the midst of shifting what I do for work, just a little bit. The idea dropped into my head on April 19 and here we are, two and a half months later and it's still coming into focus, still a work in progress. This, despite my determined and intense efforts, my enthusiastic conversations and even more determined listening, despite my endless reading and list-making. And despite the fact that it really is a slight change.

But then, it's a slight change that throws a picture out of focus, or makes you step into the stream instead of crossing dry-footed. It's a slight change in a poem between describing something as 'grey' or 'gray.' And those slight changes, those nuances matter intensely.

In this case, as in so much, I'm listening with my intuition more than anything else. Because I want this new step to be really me, so that I can use my best skills and experiences in service to others. If I try to be someone else, try to create a service I can't deliver, try to do something that doesn't fascinate me, it isn't going to go far and it isn't going to be fun along the way.

But it interests me what this process takes. For one thing, it takes time. Oodles of noodling time. For another, it takes false starts - putting forward an idea and then retracting it if it's wrong. It takes listening to wise people. It takes keeping my mouth shut until the time is right, to ponder the ideas in my heart. It takes a willingness to put my vision into words, to dare to sound idealistic and hokey. It takes notes on the backs of envelopes and chequebooks as well as on the computer and in a file. It takes a willingness to commit - to say yes and also to say no to other pulls. It takes a willingness to step into the water, to grope in the dark, to search for the right words, to listen for clarity.

And I'm almost there now. And soon it will been time to tell you about it. And to invite you to be part of it.

Not so Voodoo

2011-07-06T18:01:00.004-04:00

A few years back, an osteopath broke me. Or, to be more specific, he failed to recognize that I was in the process of herniating a disk and instead listened for my long tide and other such rhythms in my body. By the next morning, I was in agony.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my midwife and doctor got into arguments about how to treat a potentially developing condition, leaving me to decide whether to go with heads or tails.

My regular massage therapist was away and recommended his colleague, who decided to start our first meeting with a long conversation about bowel movements and was I having three bowel movements as long as my forearm daily. I left the office soon after that, and washed my hands thoroughly.

So, you see, I'm a little wary of what I call voodoo.

At the same time, there was nothing better than midwife-supervised deliveries and aftercare; I've enjoyed acupuncture (ok, enjoyed might be pushing it) and have found that oil of oregano and tea tree oil are amazing cure-alls. I find I straddle the line between traditional and alternative medicine, and that the best way for me to sort it out is to listen to my gut.

And speaking of guts...

This spring, our daughter suffered from recurring stomach pain and vomiting. Our doctor was little help and we were at our wits' end.

Finally, I decided to break down and take her to a naturopath. I rolled my eyes. "They'll probably want to know if she's left-handed and what her birth was like."

Instead, we were ushered into a wood-paneled room where we sat on a couch and explained our situation to the woman who sat across from us. We left an hour later with three bottles of potion and a blood test for food allergies finished. "She seems more human than our doctor," was my daughter's comment, while I nearly cried with relief at finally being taken seriously by a member of the medical profession.

And I could have kicked myself - because this was anything but voodoo. It reminded me of my great midwife experiences and was like a cross between a doctor and a nutritionist. There was no mention of birth conditions or handedness.

The blood tests came back saying our daughter was reactive to sugar, wheat, dairy and peanuts. We were told we didn't have to read labels, but if a product contained obvious amounts of dairy -- cheese sauce, for instance -- or wheat, we were to provide alternatives. It's actually been surprisingly easy, particularly because on this elimination diet, our daughter feels like a million bucks. And the weekend she cheated, she felt horrible again.

This weekend, though, she leaves for a week at overnight camp. She packed all her clothes and books and stuffed animals days ago, but I'm still carefully composing lists for the camp cooks and nurse, and stockpiling safe and delicious foods for her to take. And I'm crossing my toes that all goes smoothly, that she doesn't end up in the nurse's office every night, wracked with stomach cramps. Because that doesn't make for happy camp memories.

At a family gathering the other day, someone rolled their eyes when I told them about our daughter's diet. "They tell that to everyone," she said. I know what it's like to be skeptical of alternative medicines - and sometimes with good cause - but at the same time, in this situation, I felt like the parents of the man whose blindness Jesus cured; when the Pharisees came to get their take on the situation, they said, in effect, "Here's what we know: this is our son. He was blind and now he can see."

It wasn't a voodoo experience. And it worked. That's good enough for me.

Remembering Fun

2011-07-04T20:33:00.002-04:00

I read an essay once, written by a woman, who had been the only child of a woman who was an only child. The author found herself, at midlife, the mother of a young son. There was a line in the essay that went something like this: there's nothing as good for a middle-aged heart as a young son.

I would add, or possibly, a puppy.

My heart went kind of middle aged this year, weighed down by a lot of life. Miserable stuff and just plain slogging. The warm weather came late. The deadlines came early. There was a lot of putting one foot in front of the other. Oh, and swearing. I never was a swearer, but this spring, my vocabulary blossomed -- like a sailor's! It became a barometer of stress - how much I swore. (I do not record this out of any kind of pride; it's just the truth.)

The first three weeks of puppydom were, again to be honest, pretty crappy. (Oops. Well, I also speak literally here.) I think I've said as much here before, but I really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, despite having had dogs as a child and teen. And, as a friend said after adopting a child, there's a lot of adjusting and we're just impatient and want to have the adjustment period over.

Gentle Reader, the adjustment period is over. Once we figured out our dog and our dog-raising style, and he figured out his bladder and bowels, it's been a delight. I've fallen in love. I've lost seven pounds, just by walking him.

And the weather has warmed and we can swim. Today was the first real day of summer holidays and by eleven this morning, my kids were making massive, splashing tidal waves in the pool, lowering the water height by several inches, then standing on the deck in the warm puddles, all the while laughing in the sunshine.

The deadlines have passed and the urgent work is over. I've readjusted my arrangement with another client to better suit my needs. I'm playing around with a new business idea, a new novel and edits to the last one.

I went to the movies. We figured out summer holiday plans that are both fascinating and that work with a dog. (It's not Quebec, zut alors, but I've made my family promise I can speak in French. To them at least.)

You know what they say about riding a bicycle - that you never forget. It's true of fun also. I have to admit that it feels very much like the first days when you're in another culture and you speak the language, but you forget words, and verb tenses, and syntax, and it feels very foreign. Later, it will come more easily. Later, you will speak without thinking, will make jokes and convey personality. Fun is that foreign language for me right now. I'm daring to begin to believe I can unburden myself, put my feet up and relax for a bit. And even stop swearing.

A Salute to Teachers

2011-07-01T23:45:00.005-04:00

I'm married to a Physics teacher. He began teaching in the fall of 1989 and we delayed our wedding for a year because people told us we shouldn't embark on marriage during his first year of teaching. He took to teaching like a duck to water, and we only regretted waiting.

This year, in early January, he got a call from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He's been moonlighting for them for a number of years now, helping out with summer conferences, acting as a consultant for curriculum projects and even zipping over to CERN in Geneva every year to teach master classes to physics teachers. The call was a request for a semester of his time.

"Sure," he said. "Which semester?"
"The next one."
"The next semester starts in three weeks."
"Yeah--" Pause.-- "Let's see if we can make it happen."

And happen it did. Three weeks later, he had a desk and a role and he had to get used to sitting all day, and being quiet, but also being able to use the washroom at will and altering hours to arrive early or late as needed.

A few months in, they asked him if it might be possible for him to stay for two more semesters, an extra year. He talked about it with his department head and principal (oh, and his wife), and decided to accept.

So, for the first time in his career, he's working through the summer.

I mention this now because yesterday was the last day of school. Yesterday we said goodbye to a beloved teacher, who has taught our son for the last two years. We said goodbye to school routines and hello to summer. And, for the first time, my husband didn't get to bid that farewell.

We sat in the backyard in the late afternoon sun and talked about this yesterday. I asked him whether the rhythm felt wrong, whether he felt like he really should be off for the summer, and he shook his head. "I could keep doing this forever," he said. "I don't feel like I need a break."

In the last six weeks, I've had the opportunity to be the project manager for a PI project and to work closely with my husband. Fortunately we've enjoyed the experience (except for the one day he called and supper was exploding, the baby bird was getting divebombed and the puppy had to poop and I was not at all prepared to talk shop. But I digress.) I know he works hard. I know he puts in long days - certainly longer than he often spent at school. But, he doesn't bring anywhere near as much work home with him at night, and he isn't presenting new and complex material to wriggling adolescents for six hours a day. He has more personal energy at the end of the day and the end of the school year.

Oftentimes, teachers get a bum rap. "Those who can, do," people snigger. "Those who can't, teach." People make snide remarks about the holidays teachers get. This experience has been interesting and confirming to us that teaching is darn hard work. And darn good work. I look at the beloved teacher who broke her foot badly on the weekend and who still hobbled into school this week, to walk her students through their graduation and their end of year celebrations and wrap-ups. I meet former students of my husband who tell me he took away their fears of science, that he listened to them and helped them.

People ask whether he will go back to teaching. He will. That's who he is. That's what he does. He believes his value as an educational consultant will diminish the longer he is out of the classroom, and he misses the teaching part.

Still, he loves this break, where he can work with smarter minds and potty breaks.

On this first day of summer, I want to salute those teachers who can and do teach. As a learner and a mother of learners, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the hard work and heart work you put into your vocation. Enjoy every bit of summer!

How to Have Amazing Kids

2011-06-29T12:28:00.003-04:00

1. Pick a spouse who balances you. I come from a line of nervous nellies, but we're creative and passionate. My husband is a rock - for good and for bad. This combination gives our kids the benefit of both roots and wings.

2. Pick your first born well. Our family would so not work if either our second or third born had been born first. The first guy was delighted to have siblings. He didn't feel displaced - he was thrilled to have playmates.

3. Give up sleep.

4. Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray. And teach them to pray.

5. Be entirely real.

6. Say you're sorry when you mess up.

7. Cheer your guts out for them.

8. Let them be who they are created to be.

9. Create rituals, boundaries, rhythm.

10. Play with them.

11. Take parenting really seriously. When my kids were little, I had file folders of stimulating, fun activities for them, and I did them with them. Little minds blossom when stimulated.

12. Go on adventures. Every day.

13. Narrate their world in ways that help them understand it better, that connect it to what they already know.

14. Protect their innocence. For me, it was shielding my kids from 9/11 when they were young, and keeping them from movies and television shows that would have them grow up too soon and would taint their imaginations and souls.

15. Read aloud books you all love.

16. Love your spouse.

17. Tell your kids how amazing and wonderful and beautiful they are.

18. Take care of yourself. Stock your larder so you have something to give. Do things that give you an identity outside of them, things that bring you deep pleasure. Do your own emotional work.

19. Cook from scratch. Grow vegetables and pick fruit together. Avoid processed foods most of the time. Don't make McDonalds part of your life. Nutrition is under-rated when it comes to child development.

20. Know that no matter what you do, it's not your fault and it's not something for which you can pat yourself on the back. Kids and parents are human, and humans are broken and sometimes the best efforts don't pay off, and that some kids become amazing despite a lack of parental effort.

21. Don't judge other parents. We're all trying.

22. Relax. Don't oversteer or worry, and don't over-program them. You relax and let them have down time too.

Your Turn

2011-06-24T11:59:00.004-04:00

Here are some questions I've been asking. I wonder what your answers are:

What would you do even if you didn't get paid for it?

What if God asks someone to do something too big for them to do?

What will the summer schedule look like?

What do you do to recover from a stressful time?

Why do weeds grow so quickly?

Where, other than the place you live, does your heart feel at home?

Cat person or dog person?

How do you get back on track in any relationship?

How do you not miss a single moment of this glorious life?

When will the mail strike be over?

What are your 'special needs'?

Blue or green? Which is your favourite?

What do you need?

Summertime and the Living Is Complicated

2011-06-21T13:00:00.008-04:00

I walked the dog in a low-cut shirt this morning. Me, not the dog. Not J-Lo-low, but lower than usual for me. And so, I got to meet a new guy in the neighbourhood, who wanted to shake my hand and know my name. Maybe it was just that he was new, but somehow my Spidey sense wondered if the friendliness was sartorially inspired.

My boy is in Quebec City this week on a school field trip. He has plans to cross the river to Levis, secretly, this week on a pilgrimage to our favourite ice cream store anywhere, where soft-serve ice cream is dipped, not in half-waxy chocolate, but fine Belgian chocolate. I don't even like ice cream, and this stuff makes me moan with pleasure. He got his first suit yesterday and my over-active imagination darts to the morbid idea of him being buried in it. Of all the 14 year olds I know, I would trust him the most. But I would have trusted him far more a year ago, before the invincibility set in. He and his buddies entertained the idea of throwing a pinata from the bus onto the 401. They chose not to do it, mind you, but I'm not sure what they are capable of. When our puppy bites the kids, part of my chastisement to him includes, "Don't bite x. He's very special to me." My boy has medium brown hair. He probably looks like every other grade 8 student who's descending on Quebec City for the Grade Eight Field Trip this week, but he's very special to me.

My puppy is sleeping through the night. (Cue the Hallelujah Chorus.) Just over a week ago, we tried Ferberizing him, but he outlasted us. We polled everyone we knew on their dog whispering techniques. And then we decided to listen to our guts. We put his soft bed in our closet, plunked him down at 11 pm, and there he slept till 6. And has done so every night since. (This in contrast with his pathetic cries until 4 am, when we put him in his crate.) He still has no fondness for the crate by day, but he seems a bit more secure in it, and we put him in it when we go out so we don't have to hear the sorrows. He is far cuter when we've had sleep, let me tell you.

Am I the only person who must declare the end of a crisis? The May long weekend was when the puppy arrived in our family and it was also the beginning of a month of a fast-paced, multi-faceted project I took on for a client. I had to manage the project as well as edit it. As much as I take unusual delight in large scale military operations like this, I will say that it turned into a crisis, where I needed to be accessible every ten minutes around the clock for the last five days of the project. Correction, the last two days of the project and then THREE DAYS AFTER. I'm still recovering, but today I realized I needed to declare the crisis over: the puppy sleeps at night and the big beast of a project is inviolable at the printer now. Personal hygiene and normal life can resume.

My husband has commented more than once that singing in church is strange. "Where else in the world do we sing?" he says. I once read a home decorating concept that suggested that we make sure we fashion our homes to satisfy the senses that most strongly appeal to us. For many, sight ranks first, but for me it is smell and touch. Sound comes in last. We have an antiquated stereo system and rack upon rack of rarely-listened-to CD's. About a year ago, though, my family dragged me into the 21st century by buying me an iPod. Then, they showed me - more than once - how to buy and download music. Oh, I said. 80s music. I found my favourites. And then, I realized there was lots of music I loved, new and old. Two weekends ago now, though, music came to me in a new way: on neighbourhood porches. Signs were posted throughout the 'hood for weeks, and musicians noted on Facebook where they would be playing. It turned out that Alternatives, an environmental magazine based out of the University of Waterloo, was sponsoring and organizing concerts on porches around our neighbourhood, as part of an upcoming issue. I was held up for much of the afternoon but I was determined to be part of this. Late in the day, I hopped on my bike and rode up and down streets. It was pretty magical. Sidewalks, lawns and even streets were crowded with folks of all ages, standing or sitting in front of musicians who played a wide - and I mean wide - variety of music. I loved how, as I cycled past one and on to another, the musics blended.

I've been feeling guilty lately about being a less-than-adequate soccer mom. I have the competitive streak down pat, and the parental pride, but I wish I had known when we signed our wee tots up for Soccer Fun on Saturdays lo, these many years ago, that our lives would be dominated by the sport. But the guilt is more than that. We actually do manage the soccer juggle, with three kids playing at high levels of the sport, and I do enjoy it, and am glad they aren't lurking in skateboard parks every evening instead. But I just ain't one of those soccer parents. The ones who have the stats memorized, who have the correct Gator-Ade for before, during and after a match, who have decided their lives will happily be dominated by sporting events and who welcome spending weekend after weekend at tournaments. No, I'm the mother who sometimes loves it and sometimes resents it, the one who longs for more unplanned family time, the one who daydreams on the sidelines and plots books on the back of my chequebook while I watch. I did not play sports growing up. I was active but I swam and I ran and I biked. I had sporty siblings, but I just wasn't that kid. I don't bring a deficit to my kids' gene pool, physically speaking. I could have played sports, I imagine, if I had wanted to. Only I didn't. And my dirty secret is that I don't always want to now. And honestly, I feel like I'm the only one out there who feels this way.

This week, I'm thinking about summer. For the first time ever, Dave has to work for the summer, and I am giving myself permission to say that I too need to work. The last few summers, I have felt perpetually conflicted between my roles as mom and writer. This summer, I'm saying it's okay to be both, and I'm creating more of a schedule than I usually do, so that I know when to wear which hat. I'm also thinking about how to encourage my kids to take on creative projects of their own. The oldest is a photographer and will play around with film to beautiful effect. The middle child has noodled around with the idea of writing a novel, but I'm not sure how to set the stage best for that to be explored. The youngest plans puppy training as her goal. I'm thinking about how to extend that un peu. I'm also thinking about chores and whether I can pawn off the weeding on the kids. Why else did I have them?

Life and Art

2011-06-18T14:32:00.012-04:00

Behind the kitchen in Nathalie’s house, there was a long, dark cold room. It was shadowy with cracked wavy glass windows. It smelled of earth and faintly of decaying apples, damp plaster and old wood. It was a quiet, well-ordered room and the pale light trickled in at the windows and onto the rows of glass jars. Nathalie had decided to start the cleaning out of the house in the cold room.

“He makes me so mad,” Nathalie had said to Jason after she had talked to her uncle. “As if she is a crazy old lady. He say, ‘You know Maman. Jars of pennies and rolls of string. You need to look everywhere, Nathalie. She may have keep envelopes of cash.’ But she will not leave the treasures in an envelope. Whenever she receives her pension, she goes right away to the Caisse to deposit it, to get the most interest. The jars of pennies are Joacquin’s.” She sighed heavily. “The rolls of string and the jar of plastic bread clips, these all are because she hates the waste. I remember one time, she wrote to the head of the Lafortune bakeries asking how she can return the tags to be reuse.”

Oncle Antoine had said that the brother and sisters should see anything of value in the house. But what was of value? Jason wondered, looking around the cold room. Nathalie came and stood behind him and put her arms around him.

“Mmmm,” she said. “This is the smell of home to me. But you are cold. You need more than the tee-shirt out here.”

“How do you want to do this?” He gestured helplessly.

“I have been thinking about this,” she said. “We will divide everything into three piles: the garbage, the recycle and the dividing up. When we are done, we can invite the brother and sisters – le frère et des soeurs – and they can make the final decisions.”

“Why don’t they help you?” he asked. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

She rolled her eyes. “First of all, Maman is still in Florida so she will oppose this plan. And Antoine he works at a bank so it is impossible. Gertrude has cows so of course it is impossible.”

“But surely, it’s their mother’s things.”

“The bank, the cow and Florida prevents them from seeing their mother before she dies. My Tante Marie, she will come if we ask and Tante Isabelle will be happy to come but Maman and Oncle Antoine say she will put the treasures in her pockets.”

“Okay. You win the crazy family award. And you win about the temperature too. I’m going to get my jacket. And make some coffee. Do you want some?”

“I already make some.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him and the noses that met were cold.

A cardboard box sat at the front of the lower shelf. Nathalie pulled it out. It was a low open-topped box filled with rows of small brown envelopes. She put it on the counter and fingered through the envelopes.

“This is Yvette’s writing,” she said. “I will look at it later. Put it with the trésors.”

“How do you know?” He was taking another stack of cardboard fruit baskets to the recycling box, which had already become a stack next to the filled recycling box. “Did your grandmère run a fruit stand or something?”

(“Please tell me,” he would say later to his mother and to Eleanor. “Tell me you don’t keep every fruit basket you ever bought.” “Think of your little cars, Jason,” his mother said. “I barely keep anything.” He remembered coming home from university to discover that his room had been turned into a sewing room, with only his bed a reminder that he had ever lived there. She had boxed up the contents of his desk but had thrown out the box of his beloved cars. “What if I have a child someday?” he had protested in response to her explanation that he was far too old for little cars. “I’ll buy your hypothetical child his own shiny new cars,” she said. “Now get off my patterns.” The only little Matchbox car he had left was one he had kept in a box of pens - the last one to arrive in his Christmas stocking, the year before his father left. He had it in Ste. Agathe with him now. Was it better to be like his mother or Nathalie’s grandmother? Surely there was a middle ground.)

There was one row of cranberry-colored jelly in jars. It was dated only two years before. He held up a jar to Nathalie. She put a hand over his mouth and started to cry. “I know something will make me cry but not what,” she said, taking the jar from him. “This is the last confiture. She and I pick the framboises together. We do it every year, even when I am living in Halifax with Steven. I remember the day we pick these framboises. It is the week before school start and it is so cold and wet but we must go anyhow or we will have none at all.”

He looked again at the date on the jars. “I was here then, trying to decide if I would stay, wondering why anyone would stay in this foggy wet place.”

“It was the morning of the garden party,” Nathalie said, looking up. “The party where I first see you. Je souviens now – I have to rush and even though it is wet, there are so many bees and I have to go back and I make my grandmother pick fast. I pick fast because it feels like a chore, like one more thing that is necessary to do. Only –“ and the tears fell in sheets down her cheeks, “ I never for one instant think it will be the last time. I think, next year it will be better. Only next year, she is gone and I don’t even think to make the confiture. I don’t even know how for to make it.” Her voice grew louder. “I forget to learn how to make jam.”

“I know how,” he said, putting his arms around her. “Eleanor showed me last summer. I’ll teach you.”

“What if it’s different?”

“It will be,” he said. “But maybe the recipe will be in that recipe book of yours. And we can experiment till we get it right. Here, sit.” He moved a box from the counter to the floor and patted the space. She sat and he went into the kitchen. He was back a minute later, carrying a spoon.

“It feels hot in there.” He held up the spoon and raised his eyebrows. She nodded. He uncapped the jar and slid out a white waxy layer.

“Paraffin,” Nathalie said.

He scooped out a spoonful and held it before Nathalie.

“Remember,” he said and she opened her mouth and shut her eyes.

“I remember,” she said, smiling at the thought and the taste. “The first day of school almost every year. I come here after school and my grandmère is making the confiture. She do the strawberry at the end of school, the ground cherries in the middle of summer, the raspberries on the first day of school and the chilli sauce before Thanksgiving. But my favourite is the framboises – the color is so brilliant and always she allow me to put the foam on a slice of bread for my snack. Joacquin he gets to lick the pot – only she says he must use a spoon, not his fingers. One time, he sticks his whole head in the pot. I eat my pain et confiture and I tell her the news at the school and she lets me pour the paraffin on the top when I am ten years old – not before.”

“Eleanor doesn’t use paraffin,” he said. “She has a canner to boil the jars.” He handed her another spoonful. “Doctor’s orders.”

“I want to save this confiture,” she said. “I don’t think the frère et des soeurs will want it. Joacquin maybe. But I want to make a little musée and inside I can put the jars of confiture.”

“I know,” he said, screwing the lid back on. “Do you want to tackle this room another day?”

She took a deep breath. “No. Your good medicine helps me very much. Or maybe it is the sucre. We can do it – but first you need to taste the confiture yourself.” She opened the jar again and dipped her finger into it, and then into his mouth.

- from The Victory Garden by Susan Fish

Tendencies

2011-06-10T07:34:00.007-04:00

A week after the puppy barged into our lives, we had a family meeting to take stock of where we all were, and frankly, whether this was working out.

I will admit I had my doubts. Even though my family had always had dogs as I was growing up, never before had I been the Adult in The Situation. Like my kids do now, I blithely went off to school and life, leaving my mom behind to do the house training. I slept the first night on the floor with every puppy we had - and my recollection was, "after that, it was easy." So, I freely admit that the challenges of integrating a new and energetic puppy into a household took me by surprise.

Back to the family meeting. There were tensions in the house - one child was opting out of engaging with the dog, while another believed that the child who wanted the puppy most in the first place was happy to take on the lion's share of puppy care. That child had been in tears more than once at the frustrations of our wiggly wonder.

There were accusations and exasperation flying around the room before I stopped the conversation.

"OK," I said."I once read a book about marriage and it said it's easy to fight by saying, 'you never' or 'you always', but a more productive way is to look at the marriage as a third thing, to say,'what does the marriage need?' Only here, instead of marriage, we're going to say, 'what does the puppy need?' and 'what do we all need to take care of him?'"

The tone shifted. A few minutes later, as we were heading too close to the same precipice of accusations, I threw in another approach.

"We all have 'tendencies,'" I said. "Defaults. Approaches we fall into, if we don't think about it. So let's talk about what each of our tendencies are."

And we sat and admitted our foibles, our propensities, our strengths turned weak. We helped each other see ourselves better. We talked about how we could counter these tendencies.

"Yours, Mom," the kids agreed."is that you take on way too much and then you blow your stack."

Moi? I fluttered my eyelashes.

I thought about the conversation last night. Last night when I was overwhelmed. I have four work projects due in the next week, kids in soccer every evening of the week, a puppy with a witching hour, some challenging interpersonal stuff in my life, a business I'm trying to launch and general June-ness.

Last night, I had had enough. "I haven't showered in two days," I complained. "Today I had to work on three projects at the same time, and the puppy whined while we had him tied up so we could move our shoe rack into a closet. And I didn't have tuna for the dinner I had planned. And the lawn needs mowing yet again."

"Take care of yourself," my husband said, and he took the puppy and two kids to soccer. I put on my iPod and mowed the lawn. I swept up maple keys. I asked third child to vacuum and to clean the kitchen. I cut third child's hair.

And then, I took myself off alone on my bike to get a tall glass of refreshing bubble tea. I sat in the shop, still unshowered, sweaty but mercifully alone and not worried for once about the puppy, and wrote notes on the back of a chequebook. Little ideas about ways to make my full life run more smoothly, to find bits of space where I needed them. Ideas that never would have occurred to me if I had just kept pushing through.

A young woman sat at the table next to me, working away writing longhand in a binder. She packed her stuff up, just before my bubble tea arrived, and she inclined her head in my direction, to get my attention.

"I know this will sound weird," she said. "But I wanted to tell you you look beautiful today."

"Thanks," I said. "I need to hear that right now."

But, as I biked home in the cool evening air, bubble tea perched on my handle bars, I realized the value - the beauty even - of recognizing my tendencies and taking just a few minutes to live counter to these strengths made weak.

There's beauty in letting yourself be weak, be human, be yourself.

Puppy

2011-05-27T10:21:00.007-04:00

My ten year old daughter gradually covered the walls of her bedroom with images of dogs. At the top of a pyramid of cut-out calendar pictures, she affixed letters spelling out: I love dogs. She reads dog training books and dog mysteries. She saves her money and buys dog collars and leashes, which she attaches to her stuffed animals. A few weeks ago, she built and painted a doghouse out of a large cardboard box. For about three years, she has been begging and imploring us to get a dog.

Ah, we said. We have a cat. We had read studies that said you could introduce a kitten to a dog, but if you brought a puppy into a cat home, the cat would be inclined to kill, or at least hurt, the puppy. Besides, we reasoned, we couldn't do that to our beautiful old lady cat.

And then she went and died. The cat, that is.

A day later, our daughter raised a doggy eyebrow. Too soon, we said.

We talked about what we would want in a hypothetical dog. A black lab, only softer and smaller. A medium-sized dog. An easy dog. We discussed how we needed to wait until I decided whether I would continue freelancing or get a job - because we felt it wouldn't be fair to cage a dog all day. I decided against the employment option.

A month ago, we found great puppies online. Our stomachs fluttered; it felt too soon. We contacted the breeder and fortunately all the puppies were gone.

This past weekend, we found perfect puppies online. Our stomachs fluttered; it did not feel too soon. We contacted the breeder and they still had puppies. We counted the cost. We slept on it. We cleaned our house from top to bottom. We set up barriers. We called people. We picked up puppy food and poop bags. We shook our heads. We prayed. We got in the car and drove for three hours.

En route, we discussed potential names. It ran the gamut: from Chickenhead to Ethiopia, from Jasper to Newton. We narrowed the list down. We drove through rain and wind and lilacs. We talked about puppy mills and reasons we would say no, even after meeting the puppies.

When we pulled up in front of small suburban house, we were met by a comfortable-looking lady, her affable husband and relaxed, shy teenage daughter. The puppies - there were two left - were wriggling around the gated kitchen. We met the mom and dad dogs - both family pets - who were penned in a huge enclosure in the back. The family let us visit with the puppies for as long as we wished.They talked to us about the vet's reports: one had a possible mild heart murmur. Both were black, one resembling the English springer spaniel fluffy father, and the other looking much more like the Lab mother. The kids went back and forth as to which one they preferred and everyone left the decision to me. I borrowed the family's computer and looked up heart murmurs. Dave reminded me that no pet came with a guarantee.

We decided to take our chances on the soft black Lab with silky floppy ears, the one with the possible heart murmur. "Let's hope he has a good heart, even if it's a weak heart," I said. The family dropped the price for him but we said our concern was not being sold a defective dog so much as attaching ourselves to an unhealthy dog.

He curled up between the kids in the back seat and slept most of the way home. Our stomachs fluttered with butterflies of happiness. We noodled about more names as we went. Finally, our oldest said, "What about Lucky?" and suddenly all the other names slipped away. He was Lucky.

There have been moments of buyer's remorse this week, usually when we are dead tired or when Lucky's intelligence tends toward chewing and biting everything. The first day was challenging for me. I felt like I was out of my depth, that I hadn't settled on an approach for puppy-rearing. My other worry is existential: part of my work decision has been one where I'm moving out of mommydom into a new direction for my business; my fear is that puppyhood will take me right back into that role, like an unexpected pregnancy.

However, for the most part, even though I'm more of a cat lady than a dog person, and even though this pup is more for the kids than us, I'm falling in love with a puppy who is quick to learn and eager to please. I love seeing my kids take on responsibility for him. I am forever in debt to my husband for taking on the night shifts this week.

I feel pretty lucky.

Stuff and Such

2011-05-21T17:33:00.005-04:00

Oh good glory it has been a full time. My apologies for going AWOL here for a week or so.

In no particular order:

1. The chicken pox fairy came to visit our house. You would think I would recognize the signs, but in my defense, our boys had the pox almost eleven years ago, and at that point, I was reeling from the brand-new knowledge that I was pregnant with my third baby in three years. Realistically, this visit was easier and the recipient of the fairy's gifts got a torso covered with pox but only enough on her face to vaguely resemble an acne-prone teenager. The one mishap of the week was the night when the anthistamine seemed to have little effect; around midnight, it dawned on me that I had used the antihistamine from a travel kit, without checking its expiration date. March 2008. Turns out effectiveness does dwindle with age.

2. I picked up eighteen new books for review in the last week. Oink, oink. I feel like a glutton. Reviewing books is the best gig. Interestingly it is also my best source of fame. I've been writing professionally for more than fifteen years, but my "name recognition" has exponentially increased in the last year of reviewing books for the local paper. Apparently people read it. (There's a review of mine in today's paper. It was a great read.)

3. Speaking of writing, I've said for years that freelancing is "feast or famine." This school year has been a kind of lean one, work-wise, which has allowed me to edit one novel and write a draft of another. In the last ten days, though, it has been an ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET WITH GOOD DESSERTS AND DUMPLINGS. The kind you need to roll away from afterwards. My goodness. Those clients who had all been promising me work soon were not kidding. I'm not complaining in the least. I love it and every single one of the projects is fascinating (something that doesn't always happen in the freelance world, if I'm honest.)

4. That novel I edited went out into the world on Thursday, looking for an agent and a publisher. After our first visit to my sister's cottage on the Gaspe peninsula in Quebec where they asked my husband to stay to teach at the little English school, I began to imagine a character who would say yes to this and what would happen to him if he did. I wrote a novel about him. And then a second, and this year, a third. The first novel has been making the rounds for the last couple of years. Editors love it, BUT. And it has gone nowhere. This year, I worked with a fine fine editor on fine-finetuning the sequel and both of us felt that the second book was far stronger than the first. So, as a good environmentalist, I decided to recycle some of the best description from the first book, adding it to the second, among other revisions - and decided to put the first novel away in a drawer for now. The fine fine editor noted that a sequel freed me "from the burden of exposition" -- I was able to bring the reader into the story much more quickly. I don't mind putting the first one aside. I'm not sure yet what to do with the third one though. Still pondering.

5. I've written about a fictionalized version of the place I love in Quebec for the better part of a decade now. It's more than weird to think that I'm effectively done. It feels like a muse to me, Quebec does. It's familiar enough but also very compellingly foreign. When we went to Italy two years ago, I wondered if I could write fiction about the place (read: more research trips required!) but Italy felt too foreign and inscrutable to me. I felt I did not dare to try. Anything I could think of felt either like A Room with A View or Under the Tuscan Sun. With Quebec, the difference feels approachable. Maybe it's the shared Canadianness, and the separate nationhood. The challenge for me now is how to write fiction about something else. I have several ideas in mind and I'm very interested in the stories. I can't tell, though, whether I need to write more about my muse or whether immersion in a new imaginary world just takes time.

6. For the first time, I included a real person in fiction this year. He is disguised - not with the anti-semitism and small apparatus Anne Lamott recommends for concealing identity from the original person - or, more truly, blended with several other people so that the character is an entity unto himself. However, the real version just dropped a bouquet of asparagus at my door. (Do not panic, Gentle Reader. I have no intention of making it a habit of including real people in fiction.)

7. A robin started a nest atop the wicker shelving unit we inherited from the woman who owned our house before us. Dave destroyed it as the shelves are right outside our back door and he did not want to be divebombed each and every time we went outside. We placed a plastic owl in its place to Scare Her Away. Instead, she moved to the apartment downstairs and built a nest on the second shelf. There are now three gorgeous eggs inside. And, if we are stealthy, we can see her profile as she sits on the nest. She looks strained with attention as she protects her babies. Yesterday was the first truly warm day and we weeded the back gardens, mowed the lawns and ate outside. All of this made her keep away from the nest for quite a while. You can tell we miss having a pet: I thought about ways to keep the eggs warm and called to her to tell her it was safe for her to sit on the nest, and Megan dropped bread crusts on the ground near the nest for her.

8. Our old house is for sale. I was biking past it when I happened to notice an open house sign. I turned and went home - into the house I know with every one of my senses, as well as my heart. It's a lovely house and has been well-loved the last few years too. But we decided not to move back, even though we entertained the idea for a few hours. I like that we had the choice and also that we choose to move forward and not to take the safest options.

9. I've been away from our church for several months now. When the chaos of illness in my immediate and extended family was heightened, I decided I needed to do two things: cull my Facebook friends list to a much smaller group, and finish my role as Children's Ministries Coordinator at church. I had planned to finish in May or June anyhow, but it was a good decision to leave. For a few weeks after that, I needed to be with Megan who was sick, and then we needed to be visiting my grandma or my sister, and then we chose to go away at Easter. But I also decided that when I was in town and available, I would take myself to different churches, as a mini-sabbatical, so that there would be some space for me and others between my role as coordinator and my role as regular person. My family has gone to our church - when they are well and in town - without me. It's been interesting.

Oh, I'm sure there's more. But that will keep for another day.

The Meaning of Life

2011-05-12T10:55:00.000-04:00

I am not 29 and holding. I'm not 39 again. I'm 42 today.

When I was 18, I had a strong sense of coming into my own. I was finally free, in my last year of high school, to take the courses I was passionate about. I was finally allowed to roam the big city on my own. I remember in particular a bright spring afternoon when I took myself out for a movie I knew I would enjoy more on my own than with anyone else. It was a heady, powerful time. It is no wonder, I think in hindsight, that this was the time I met and fell in love with my husband. I was incredibly alive.

If you are at all familar with the Myers-Briggs personality tests, you will know that NF's like me are forever and always wondering what we will be when we grow up. I spent years after high school fraught with anxiety around questions of vocation and work.

I planned to teach gifted kids, but I hated sociology; I loved English literature, but what do you do with an English degree? I accepted a teaching position and spent every day of the next year in tears. I started to figure out what I was good at and what I loved. What I recall most clearly was my colleague, a man named Valentine, who was easily 50 years my senior but who was younger than me -and the rest of us - in spirit. At 28, I had my first baby. I had post-partum bliss. A colleague commented that she had never seen me so free and happy. I loved parenting my kids and found a good work-family-life balance.

In the last few years, though, several shifts have happened: I began writing fiction again, in earnest, after my daughter was born; I had a back injury that resulted in some degree of chronic disability; my kids needed less than all my attention.

This past winter, I went on my annual solo retreat, determined to sort out once and for all - ha! - what I would be when I grew up. Or at least the next step.

The retreat centre I visit has a small stone labyrinth. I set out to walk it this January, weighed down with my questions and angst.

Only it was covered in snow. No problem, I thought, I can see the lumps that are the stones - I'll walk it anyhow. Only halfway round, I realized I was utterly outside the circle. A thought slipped into my mind: This isn't the season for walking the labyrinth. You can't know yet.

It made me think of Rilke, who writes: Try to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is: live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

And that's what happened. There was a cat and two books and some pain - and then one late night epiphany.

Only here's the thing: despite the gray hair and the aching back and the immediate (but deferred) need for bifocals that was come with the accumulation of years, I feel more like I did when I was 18 than anything else. I feel freed and wild and excited. I feel a deep sense of satisfaction and belonging and passion. I feel a rightness about the new possibilities that are opening up. Whether my plans come to fruition or not, I am on a very good track. I feel like I'm owning my own truth, as they say, more than I have in years and years. I'm delighted and relieved that my marriage and family are flexible and accommodating enough to allow me to take on new ventures. I'm grateful for people who are encouraging me to dream big dreams.

I'm writing this with a fever and a stiff right shoulder - I'm no spring chicken - but also with a heart that feels like a powerful engine, racing to go, eager to take the next bend in the road.

Happy birthday to me!

I forgot how green

2011-05-07T17:48:00.005-04:00

I forgot how green the world is in May. Truly I did.

It's been such a cold, damp spring that only now is everything alive starting to believe that the winter is past. My elderly friend and former neighbour told me once that in our neck of the woods, asparagus grows between Mother's Day and Father's Day, but this morning at the market, the only asparagus to be found was withered and woody, imported from California and Peru.

But the thin green straws of lilies of the valley are emerging from the brown shoots that precede and protect them. Tulips have sprung out of nowhere - from small shoot to bloom in less than a week, it seems. Trees are almost chartreuse, with baby buds, limp maple flowers that will drop as the leaves unfurl.

The grass these days is an incredibly verdant velvet. Most of us have not yet found time to mow the lawn and so it has a bit of a shagginess to it, like the lush pelt of some great green beast.

The air smells green and fresh and the light is clear and brilliant, almost blinding.

Ever heard of pathetic fallacy?

That's what this feels like to me. After a few sorry months of strain, we are emerging on the other side. Not one bad thing has happened in our immediate household for a few weeks now. We finally have been bolstered by support from the medical system. I've finally dared to relax, to breathe, to dream.

All well and good. Breathe a sigh of relief. Raise a glass. But, first, a confession: when things went south, so did my attitude.

Years ago, I heard someone tell a story about being completely dirt-broke poor, with not a penny to spare, and a tremendous amount of strain to even make the most basic ends meet. What I remember most about this story was what this person did: every day, she changed her underwear several times. She did it as the only treat she could afford, because it was one thing she could do to remind herself that despite her straitened circumstances, she was a worthwhile human being.

One thing you should know about me is that I never think anything will end. I'm always and forever surprised and sad when a vacation comes to an end, when a stage of life passes into the next, when I get to the bottom of a bowl of M&M's. I want every good thing to last forever. The flip side is that I never believe the bad times will end either. I steel myself for a filling at the dentist - more than I need to. I miss my husband terribly when he goes away, with a feeling like homesickness. I brace myself against winter, expecting it to be eternal.

And then spring comes and dazzles me once again.

I don't know if this is something easily changeable. Perhaps it is a longing for eternity. All I know is that far from changing my underwear several times a day this winter, I put on sackcloth and ashes, and a survival suit - and just cleaned up the vomit, called the insurance company, begged for doctors' appointments, did the work that needed doing, made meals, ate and slept.

Only here's the thing. Every year, in the cold of winter, after the Christmas decorations have been packed away, I buy pots of forced bulbs and I watch as the snow accumulates outside and the audacious green shoots push bravely upward.

It is possible to find spring in the dead of winter.

And while what melted the ice of my life was the sympathetic and professional help the naturopath gave my daughter, what brought bits of spring into my life was when I finally remembered that I was not required simply to keep putting one foot in front of the other, but I was allowed to dance. Even when things were still worrisome and frustrating.

For years, I've saved a quote from a Starbucks coffee cup on my kitchen windowsill. It reads: There are many times when dancing is the most unsupportable, ridiculous, unexpected and necessary action. Life should be spent finding those moments and tap dancing through them.

I knew about the coffee quote and I knew about the underwear change, but I forgot. I'm writing today in case you are as foolish as me, believing what your circumstances tell you about who you are rather than remembering to dance and planting a little bulb of belief that spring will come.

It will be greener than you ever remembered.

Dear Matt

2011-05-03T09:12:00.006-04:00

Dear Matt,

Next month you will be fourteen years old. We realized the other day that the next time there is a federal election, you will likely be eligible to vote. It's amazing to realize that every day does accumulate and that so soon, you will be a grown man.

You laughed at me during this election, as I flipped and flopped. (They say the ability to see both sides can be a sign of intelligence, you know.) But, I also wanted the process to be transparent for you and your brother and sister - I wanted you to see that engaging in political process is challenging in so many ways. I'm conscious that it's not possible to raise kids in a neutral way: at this point, you will tend to believe what we, your parents, believe. But, on the other hand, you've been a reality check to us: do we believe what we believe - about God, the world and its power structures - do we believe enough that we are willing to indoctrinate you?

When you were four years old, on your very first day of kindergarten - September 11, 2001 - the world as we knew it blew up. You know what we did that day: we went to Herrles' Country Farm Market and ran in the corn maze, we bought corn and apples and we laughed. You know - although you won't really know until you are a parent yourself - that day was one of my bravest and proudest days as a parent. Because what I did that day was to utterly refuse to give in to fear. I refused to allow terrorists to dictate my life - and, even more importantly, yours. I did not take you out of school and clutch you to me. I looked at the empty skies and breathed deeply to hold the tears at bay. Every single night, the instant you and your brother and baby sister were asleep, your dad and I turned the television on, desperate to devour details that would help us understand. But what we understood, instinctively, from the very first day was that we would choose to live our lives even though we walked through the valley of the shadow.

A different shadow has been cast over our country in the last few years - a shadow of government corruption. You know I've been angry about it. You know I want it to be stopped. And you know the root of my flip-flopping: do I vote against what I despise or for what I want? I laughed with you on Sunday afternoon when we pictured me, lining up over and over at the polling booth, getting to the front of the line and being unable to commit so going to the back of the line again. It was a possible scenario because the dilemma ran that deep.

I wrote about our September 11 experience and it was published. Some people found my response frivolous, apolitical and untheological. But someone else wrote back that it was indeed a political response and a theological one - and a very valid response to the situation.

I made up my mind about how I would respond to this election late Sunday night. When I woke yesterday, my mind was unchanged. I tried to put myself ahead 12 hours, to imagine how I would feel in the worst case scenario if I voted according to my conscience, rather than strategically. I walked into the cardboard booth and my eyes welled up with tears. I tried to understand why. A day later, I have an idea.

Because my worst case scenario did happen - a sweeping majority. And yet, last night, I had a very peaceful sense that continues this morning. I think my tears and my peace come from the same place. It is a place of peace with myself. Because I voted with hope. I voted for a vision I believe in even if it is hard to see on today's political landscape. There is a line I recall from one of The Lord of the Rings movies. It happens as the Men of the West are mustering anxious troops and the leaders are conferring quietly. "We cannot win," one says. "No," says another, with a gleam in his eye. "But we can fight."

Fear paralyzes me too often in life, honestly it does. I fear heights, I fear snakes, I fear some illness. I feel badly, Matt, for what I say to you and your brother and sister in my fears. I'm glad none of you share those fears. My deep deep desire today is that you and they will see my "naive", non-strategic decision yesterday as a choice to fight with hope and love.

One of the elements that reminded me that it was okay to vote according to my conscience was my faith - a faith that reminded me that God is God and I am not, that even when the dust of the election cleared, God would still be God. My job was to be faithful to a vision I could believe in.

I had tears again last night, as I read aloud the climax of the book I've been reading to you guys - Museum of Thieves. Great danger has come to the city that protects its children, the city where even the adults are unprepared for trouble. "There had been nothing to test his courage, nothing to teach him when to stand and when to run. Now he was paralyzed with fear...they were afraid to stay where they were, and they were afraid to go." Flip-flopping again. The hero of the book must convince the city to flee the danger, but its inhabitants are paralyzed. But here is where the tears came: "Each time, it was the children who slipped out into the raging darkness first."

Jesus said, "Unless you become like a little child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Yesterday your brother's class held a mock election. The NDP won with a Green opposition. My vote yesterday was, I hope, not a childish one, but a childlike one. Like the kids in your brother's class, I dared to believe that I could vote for the party with a vision I could believe in, and a leader I could admire wholeheartedly.

And yet, here we are today. Are we defeated? Not hardly. Because as much as I believe deeply in the democratic process, I also believe that we have more opportunities than simply at election time. We can hold our Member of Parliament accountable, speaking truth to power. We can also make choices in our community each and every day that reflect the values we want to see, the values we wished we could see in our representatives.

Matt, you head into an unknown future. So many people would tell you to be careful -- and they are not wrong, any more than the people who chose to vote strategically were wrong last night. They are not wrong. But, I want you to choose life in every way, to embrace it with hope and passion, to stand up for what is true and beautiful, to laugh and to cry, to fall down and to get up and try again. Don't fall prey to cynicism - stay engaged and alive. And be exactly who you are.

Much love,

Mom

Impossible Choices

2011-05-01T17:28:00.004-04:00

My daughter invented a new holiday a few years ago: Birthday Eve. Like Christmas Eve, Birthday Eve is characterized chiefly by excitement about the next day, but occasionally a present or two can be opened the night before.

Tonight does not feel like Birthday Eve.

Tomorrow we will vote. (Oh, please tell me you will vote. Think of the people who have died around the world, in the last six months, for precisely the right you are willing to throw away. I don't think any of them were expecting a perfect candidate before they would exercise their franchise. Please, please vote.)

I am torn in this election though. Deeply torn. I live in what's called a "swing riding." In the last election, the incumbent lost by 17 votes. In that election, I voted with my conscience. Afterwards, when I saw who actually won and what it contributed to, I realized that my conscience would have been fairly happy voting with the incumbent. I knew a good dozen other people who felt the same way.

So, fast-forward to this spring. And here is my choice: do I vote tomorrow for what I want or vote against what I don't want? If I vote against what I don't want -- "holding my nose" as I've been hearing people say -- how am I different from the thing I don't want, the leader who has moved from principle to what I see as complete corruption on the basis of expediency?

And yet, it came down to 17 votes the last time and the polls say it will be this close tomorrow night again.

The books I'm reading counsel me. I read a biography of Bonhoeffer a few months back, and I've had to consider what the German pastor who was instrumental in a plot to kill Hitler, would do in this situation.

When I think about casting my vote according to my conscience, I am of mixed minds too. I feel like a fool - but maybe a holy fool, a Shakespearean fool, rather than a complete idiot.

Here my reading of the memoir of Christian Peacemaker Team kidnap victim, James Loney speaks into the situation. He writes, "Do we choose the power of threat, ultimatum and consequence, gun and bomb, or the power of love, solidarity and compassion, patience and reconciliation? Is it the power of domination and subjugation or the power of nurturing and collaboration? Is it the power to destroy or the power to heal, to take life or give life?"

In the moments when I have been quiet and still, at peace with myself, I lean this way. This is more me. It is better to choose love rather than fear. The cross looked like failure even more than casting a lone, useless vote for a party that cannot win. And yet.

I went into the headquarters of the party of my choice a few weeks back and volunteered for them for a half an hour or so. The one thing I wouldn't do, I said, was to canvass because I could not fault those who had decided to vote against what I too do not want.

Over and over again, this process reminds me of vaccination: the people who decide not to have their children vaccinated depend on the majority deciding otherwise. If we all refrained, our kids would die of smallpox and other eradicated diseases.

Here the problem is not the individuals so much as the system. In a proportional representation system, no one would be urging me to choose the fearful response, and we would all be free to vote according to our consciences and our visions of the world.

But that is not the world we live in. My task tomorrow - and yours too - is to sort out what it means to live with hope and idealism in a very real world. And to vote.

...Or are you just happy to see me?

2011-04-27T19:09:00.010-04:00

The last (unintentionally) provocative title spurred on a reading frenzy so I thought I would (intentionally) aim for continuing appeal to readers.

However, not only am I looking for readers, but also commenters. So, here's what I'm going to do -- one lucky commenter to this post will receive from me a signed copy of my novel. I will choose randomly from among the dozens who reply to this posting. Be sure to tell your friends to wander over here to read. (Also, tell them that the title of the post was largely to create buzz. And that I'm not usually this rude.)

But back to the topic at hand.

The contents of my pockets have come up twice in conversation this week: at my writers' group, we discussed a piece of writing where an emigrant tries to bring a bit of home with them in their pockets. We talked about what can easily be brought across the border, what is hazardous to the wearer (glass and pointy objects), what is likely to get lost (dirt, sand). I mentioned that I regularly keep pieces of sea glass in the pockets of the coats I wear at the cottage we visit each summer. It's a very comforting, happy instant for me to slip my hands into my pockets and find the sea-and-sand-softened glass. Sometimes I also bring home small stones for the same purpose. It makes me feel like I'm still there in the place I love.

The other thing I carry in my pocket is a euro coin. I carried it in my wallet for a while but I kept mistaking it for a loonie and felt disappointed. I like to carry the euro though as a reminder to myself that I am a person who has traveled to Europe before and might do so again someday.

Pockets are curious things. Private places. We carry Kleenex, new and used, in pockets. We carry trash in our pockets, temporarily, before we find a garbage can. We carry keys and coins - things that will take us places. We carry lists that tell us where to go.

But we also carry talismans in our pockets, things that tell us who we are, where we've come from and where we hope to go.

So, the prize-offering question: What do you carry about in your pockets, and why?

Plastic Surgery

2011-04-25T21:54:00.006-04:00

When my book was published five years ago, I had to get an Author Portrait taken. I went to a studio and posed and then watched the photographer as he worked on my photos on his computer. It was my first experience with the possibilities of digital photography. I loved that he could remove an errant hair that had blown across my face and that he could take out the reflection from my glasses. But then, he started to remove the laugh-lines and dark circles around my eyes, smoothing out my skin tone.

I made him go back to an earlier version. "I'm not 20," I said. "And furthermore, I didn't look like this when I was 20."

My oldest son has a passion for photography and he loves to doctor photos on our Mac computer. He'll saturate a photo with colour, make Warhol-like images, crop, enhance, blend and more. He loves an audience so sometimes I sit and watch him tinker. Generally, my vote is for the essentially unaltered image and his is for a better version of reality.

There's one place we agree.

When I ask for a photo of me, any close-ups in bright light, I have him remove the vertical line, the frown, that sits between my eyebrows. In an instant, he airbrushes it away, and I look like I did when I was 30, like I wish I still did now. I wouldn't go under the knife -- or the needle -- but I'm willing to squint a little (or erase the burden of frequent squinting) when it comes to Photoshopping my frown away.

Only today, he showed me the photo I've included here. He took it last night and he touched up absolutely nothing. And my frown was missing.

Sure, maybe it's the half-light. Perhaps it's my expression. Or, just maybe it had to do with where we were.

We spent this weekend at my parents' cottage, perched high on a cliff above Lake Huron. From the back porch of the cottage, the lake extends out like a half-moon of unbroken horizon of blue water. We had begged the cottage of my parents. The last time we had tried to go away, our daughter had been sick: truthfully, we didn't want to waste money again on a failed family vacation.

The forecast was for solid rain all weekend, so we decided to do our chores first of all when we arrived on Good Friday. My parents had not had a chance to rake the leaves off their treed property. We picked up sticks and limbs and tossed them into the gully that runs beside the property. We scratched at leaves and ripped out last year's dead flowers. I had told my mother that my goal was to "be a bum all weekend." This bum found it deeply satisfying and extremely apt to rake on Good Friday - letting go of the old, dead life to say yes to the life that was and is to come.

The wind moaned all night, and then we all slept in, and woke for pancakes. The sky brightened and we set out to visit an odd little flea market we had passed many times before. Our daughter grew tired, still not entirely well, and so we came back to the cottage for an early lunch. Revived, we set out again and found a hiking trail above the neighbouring town, one that took us to a converted railway trestle bridge. Some of us crossed and some sat on benches quietly and watched the world below. We found a beach and walked into the warm sunny wind.

We played board games, we watched a little hockey on the six-inch-square television, we introduced the kids to 'Waking Ned Devine.' We ate prepared food - both food we had prepared ahead of time and easy store-bought food. We read books that reflected each of our passions. Our daughter brought Steve, her stuffed llama. He slept on an ottoman. Our oldest took time-lapse photos of two brilliant, unpredicted sunsets.

I wanted to go to the Easter sunrise service in the nearby town, but it started early. I wasn't sure I'd be up. When I woke, spontaneously at 6:21 am, I decided to watch the sunrise alone and I quietly dressed and slipped out into the early morning dawn. The sky was brilliant salmon, but it quickly turned to grey cloud. I could see intimations of glory but never the blinding ball of fire. I walked the kilometre of road connecting the cottages. I brought the account of Mary Magdalene who rose early and went to the tomb and found it empty. But I wasn't alone. Not only in an Emmaus Road sense, but I was accompanied by a chorus of all sorts of songbirds. It was a noisy sunrise service. It was lovely.

We went to church en famille at 11 after we had hunted for chocolate eggs. We had never been to that particular church before but my parents said they had an amazing rummage sale each fall, so we made our choice. The sermon was good and there was a decent choir and friendly people. What stunned us all though happened at the point in the program when a solo was indicated. A woman of about 55 who looked like every churchgoing stereotype you can imagine stood up at the front of the church. She was to be accompanied by violin. My expectations were low. And then she opened her mouth -- and my jaw dropped as she belted out a slightly modified version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah in the most fabulous, powerful contralto voice.

In the afternoon, we went into the other nearby town for an Easter egg hunt. Our pockets filled with chocolate, we split up - my husband taking our photographer to a nearby conservation area to hike, the younger kids and I staying at the cottage. We set up blankets on the grass at the top of the cliff and brought out fruit and cookies, and I read aloud to them for an hour or more, playing Uno between chapters. The sun was intense and I needed a hat. There was no hat to be found so I put a cardboard box over my head and kept reading. We worked together to make a ham and scalloped potato casserole, thickening the sauce with pancake mix. (It worked!)

After the others came home with hundreds of photos and sunburned noses, I sat outside alone and listened to my iPod. I let it pick the songs and I must say, it knew what it was doing. The sun rippled on the water below, everything was pastel for Easter - the still muted early spring colours of the landscape, the soft sky and water. Eventually I could stand it no longer and I took off my shoes and socks and danced alone on the lawn in the sunlight.

So, last evening, after the scalloped potatoes and before Ned Devine won his millions and we ate popcorn, my son and I walked down the lane again, to put boxes in the communal recycling bin, to talk about the world and his life, to take photos of the sunset and the trees and every beautiful thing.

And somehow, my wrinkles had disappeared, and I too was one of the beauties of the day.

Hallelujah.

Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward

2011-04-22T11:22:00.000-04:00

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.

- John Donne

The Journey

2011-04-20T14:11:00.000-04:00

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

© Mary Oliver

Easter Water

2011-04-19T14:15:00.002-04:00

I like quirky religious things.

I did not like the finger of John the Baptist in the spooky darkened room of the Florentine museum. That gave me the creeps. And I suspected there were more than ten of them out there. So, not relics. But rituals.

A friend once told me how when she was a child, her mother used to give her and her brother a peppermint before they went into the service. On Communion Sundays, the two kids would save their candy until the Host had been distributed to all the adults and then they would reverently remove the wrapper and place the wafer on their tongues in unison with the other worshippers. Another friend used to make the communion bread for his church and he mused that if he made raisin bread, he could get the whole communion in one shot – a two-for-one deal.

I love that kind of thing.

Last week I went into a little soap store near my house. I’ve only ever been in there once before but they are the only source for violet soap I’ve been able to find in Canada, so I went in. On the shelf next to the violet soap sat a collection of small 4 ounce bottles of clear liquid. On the front of the bottles were labels with a crowned woman with a double chin, luminous skin and a middle distance stare. Below her portrait, it reads “Eau de Paques/ Easter Water.”

It was ten days until Easter.

I spied Easter Water Soap on the shelf above and opened a box to sniff the soap. It was shaped with crosses and crowns and it smelled fresh.

“Can I help you?” asked the clerk, who turned out to be the owner.

I asked about the water and she rolled her eyes. She had been sent a box from head office after Christmas and had been able to sell exactly none, so she was giving a bottle away with each purchase. She had no idea what was in the bottle – “I’m not superstitious, I mean, religious at all,” she said.

I checked out the company website when I arrived home. This is what it said: “For our ancestors, Easter water was known to have multiple virtues. Then and for some, still today, Easter water protected houses against bad spririts [sic], thunder and bad weather. It was also used to heal skin and eye problems and was also used for sacraments. This Easter water was collected according to the purest tradition, from a spring before sunrise, on the day of Christ's Resurrection.” Apparently it was to retail at 19.95

I opened the bottle. The water smelled sweet, with possibly the lightest hint of mint or rain. It cautioned against internal use. I put a dab on my wrist and googled ‘Easter water.’

Apparently, it is an old tradition to fetch water before sunrise on Easter morning from a source of running water. Prayers are said and hymns sung as the water is gathered. Family members take a drink of the water.

“It wasn’t a sacrament or something official that was promoted by the church,” said Marc Pelchat, a Catholic priest and professor at Laval University in Quebec City. “ But it was not denounced, either. It was more of a cultural manifestation of faith.”
Another variation on this was to bless ordinary water during the Saturday evening Easter vigil. Families would be given some blessed Easter water to take home as a symbol of the family’s renewal in Christ. It would be sprinkled on all family members and friends present, as well as in all the rooms of the house.

As the rooms are sprinkled, the father may read the following prayer: Graciously hear us, Holy Lord, Almighty Father and Eternal God, that, even as You protected the homes of the Hebrew people leaving Egypt by means of the destroying angel; which homes were stained with the blood of a lamb (which prefigured our Pasch in which Christ was immolated); so may you in the same manner condescend to send your holy angel from heaven that he may guard, foster, protect, visit, and defend all the inhabitants of this dwelling. Through the same Christ Our Lord. Amen.

I was willing, at the start of our spell of bad luck, to buy a pot of shamrocks before St. Patricks Day. For some reason, however, I’m reluctant to sprinkle my house with Easter water. It does feel superstitious and I’m not sure I understand it.

At the same time, at this time of year of miracle and deep mysteries, neither am I willing to dismiss it or to throw it away. I keep it on my shelf and I look at it, shake it periodically like a snow globe, and open it occasionally for a strengthening breath. And I wonder.

Stories for the Journey

2011-04-17T16:38:00.008-04:00

I am not the world's biggest fan of flying.

It's not so much that I am afraid as that I find it uncomfortable. My hip to knee length exceeds the seat-to-seat length of economy seats (and the cost of business class seating exceeds my budget). The smell of jet fuel can turn me nauseous in about five seconds. The droning of engines grates on my ears after a while.

On the other hand, I don't know that I will ever lose a sense of wonder that a schoolbus filled with people and heavy luggage can lift from the ground. Every single time I fly, I'm astonished. And, I love the exciting rush of takeoff - complete with its risks and dangers. I love feeling myself pushed to the back of my seat, feeling the plane strain beneath me and then the sharp angle of miraculous flight.

After that, it gets a little tedious.

In January, I flew to Florida and back. It was on the return flight, when I was more than eager to see my husband and sons, that I happened to glance up the aisle, somewhere over Kentucky, at all the people nestled like embryos in a womb.

What struck me was the fact that the vast majority of my fellow passengers were passing the time reading novels and newspapers. If there had been an inflight movie, those who were sleeping or playing electronic games might have opted for that.

I suspect that to some people my business as a storyteller may seem a bit impractical, even odd, compared with the practical dry goods of accounting or medicine or marketing. And yet, stories weave around us everywhere, helping us to pass time with pleasure instead of pain. It made me proud of being a writer, made me feel that what I do matters to people.

A month before my flight, I met Canadian humourist Stuart McLean when he signed books at our local bookstore. I stood in line and listened as person after person told him about circumstances in which they had read his writing. The woman just in front of me had read his stories aloud to her dying grandmother. McLean nodded: he had heard this before.

Stories accompany us on our journeys.

I think there's light at the end of the tunnel of unfortunate events that has been my life for the past two months, but I have felt especially weary of the struggle this week. Distract yourself, my mother says: go shopping.

But I don't. Well, I do, but it has little effect. What I do instead is go to stories. In the last four days, I have gone to one play and two films.

Today's film was 100 Days - a story of a motley group of young people who built a raft and sailed it down the Yukon River in the summer of 2005. As I walked out of the theatre - the only person there in a skirt, I think - I wondered what the stories I've watched had in common, and what they say to me. Because they've been an unusual combination.

On Thursday, I attended a student matinee of the play The Lark, a retelling of the trial of Joan of Arc. Yesterday, Dave and I went to another matinee of the remake of the movie Arthur. And today, 100 Days.

At a very basic level, my mother is right: everyone needs to escape for a little while from the challenges of their life. Good stories do that well. I laughed during every story I watched.

But stories do more than that. As the narrator of 100 Days said of a rafting journey, "There's a lot of middle. There's a beginning and an end but there's a lot of middle." Stories shape the middle from muddle. The Lark almost ends with the death of Joan, but then those enacting her story remember what's important is her moment of victory and so they re-make a mere series of events into a history that is truer than facts. At one point in Arthur, the title character's nanny confronts Arthur's mother who has called her son weak: "He's a lot stronger than you think."

And this is how stories strengthen us. I think of The Lord of the Rings and how Sam encouraged Frodo: "It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it's only a passing thing this shadow, even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines it'll shine out the clearer."

We climb on a plane and buckle ourselves in willingly, though few of us have any idea how planes overcome gravity, and in this liminal space we read stories that tell us more of who we are and even who we might be. And so, too, we climb into the sometimes turbulent seats of our lives and we are accompanied by stories that strengthen us for the journey, that shape our understanding of ourselves and who we might be when we arrive in the foreign land that is each new day.

Eleuthera

2011-04-12T09:20:00.003-04:00

The garbage truck has just turned the corner. It takes away the last of the cat litter, the tins of cat food, the final visible signs of our cat who died last week at nearly 17 years of age.

She had been in decline for weeks now, but most especially the last two weeks of her life. I was pretty sure she was not going to make it, but I took her to the vet anyhow, in case somehow it was an abscessed tooth, a parasite, or something easily curable.

It was not.

Vets have to do a careful dance with their clients. Some can bite and some can scratch. As for those who pay the bills, there is great variety too, and the vet we saw, new to the practice we have been part of for all these years, cautiously offered bloodwork, ultrasound, x-ray, appetite-inducing medicine and even exploratory surgery.

Our cat did not bite and we did not either. I began to cry but I shook my head. One thing I am tremendously grateful for is that our philosophy was clear and I had the words to express it at the very same time as my heart was breaking. She was our beloved pet, but she was an animal and she was old and we would not waste money to prolong her suffering. Two hours later, after we had said our goodbyes, tried to record her purrs, photographed ourselves with her listless self, she was given an injection that killed her within ten seconds.

Our cat's name, Eleuthera, is Greek. It means 'freedom.' For years, we thought it was an ironic name, given that she was a mostly indoor cat. But, she enjoyed a different sort of freedom right to the very end: the freedom of being loved completely. This is the other matter I am grateful for: we were able to love her enough to let her go gracefully and at the right time. Weirdly, it reminded me of how my oldest child weaned himself - we were so synchronized that it was an unconscious, almost unnoticed agreement. I think our cat would have died within a very few days and yet not long before she was still pouncing and purring.

A cat is not theoretical in any way. Cats are utterly present - or now, in our case, absent. We played back her purrs while she was still with us and they sounded wrong, mechanical, artificial. Dave said that purring is felt as much as heard. And that has been my experience of grieving a cat too. I had a thousand names for this cat, pet names, but I had never written any of them down. They were oral names, relational ones.

This does not hurt like the loss of a person: it is less. But, in an odd way, it is more. She could curl up in the smallest, most unexpected place and so I expect to see her anywhere and everywhere, a little paw to come under the bathroom door. It feels as if, say, the colour green was removed and while there are other colours, you see that there were bits of green everywhere and its absence stings. The world is less colourful.

She should have died twelve years ago. We were renovating our old house and had taken special care to close the doors of the bedrooms being gutted. I was eight months pregnant with our second child when, one night, we heard remote mews. We checked the outside door - nothing. We searched the house - no cat. And then we realized that the plaintive cries were coming from inside a wall. The cat had slithered into the renovation room and had fallen down between open joists into the room below. Dave and I looked at each other and had no idea what to do. Leaving her and encasing her in concrete, Mafia-style, were suggested. But, as I couldn't actually kill an ant while I was pregnant, we tried harder. Midnight found Dave holding a skillsaw on the kitchen wall, calculating how low he could cut without slicing off a curious cat's head. The space between the joists was too narrow for his arm to fit down, but my belly was too big for me to manage it. In the end, I turned sideways and reached down to rescue a bundle of trembling fur, to set her free.

I have written before about how I gave her a voice - an irreverent, wickedly funny voice. One of the challenges for me is to find a place for that voice in my own self.

The night she died and all the next day, mourning doves appeared in our garden, on our house, in the trees around the house. They called out their gentle, sad coos even in the night when I was awake. I have not heard or seen them since.

I think it was CS Lewis who said, of grief, that it was like quitting smoking -- which would be quite bearable, if only one could have a cigarette. It's been five days now so I'm better than I was and the kids are fine. I'd be perfectly fine too, I think, if I could only hold my kitten.

Melman

2011-04-03T20:46:00.007-04:00

My name is Susan and I am an intermittent hypochondriac.

For the most part, I have very good health sense - I have a good recall of symptoms and treatments for a number of illnesses; I don't clog the health care system with needless panic; I get appropriate vaccinations for people in my family; I get a physical at least every year or two.

But every once in a while, especially when stress is high, I throw myself into a panic and know for certain that I have, or someone in my care has, a Dread Disease. This weekend it was blood poisoning: I cut my hand on a piece of sharp aluminum while gardening. I didn't think twice about it until the next morning when it was red and very sore and then I thought BLOOD POISONING!! It wasn't long ago that I read a biography of Norman Bethune, the celebrated Canadian thoracic surgeon who served in Spain and China and who died of BLOOD POISONING!! It wasn't pretty. I mean Bethune. Or maybe my panic as I stared at my hand, wondering when the red streaks would start down my arm. I did the wrong thing and looked up cures on the Internet. Apparently a good course of antibiotics usually does the trick, but apparently sometimes it just kills you. I looked up home remedies and discovered a whimsical story -- by someone who clearly had not read about Bethune -- about how his sweet mother cut open an Irish potato and put it against the infected wound, drawing out the poison.

What if my potato isn't Irish? I asked Dave and we laughed our heads off.

The good thing about being an intermittent hypochondria - besides the relief of NOT DYING OF BLOOD POISONING!! - is that one can have a sense of humour about one's madness.

I have a friend who is also usually sane and reasonable who suffers from intermittent hypochondria. Once we talked about the fact that we might have head cancer. And we laughed at that.

Non-hypochondriac sickness continues apace at our house. It's the source of the stress that brings out my worries.

But just yesterday I drove home an acquaintance whose life has been severely curtailed by a serious heart condition and who faces his third open heart surgery, a surgery he must stay awake for. Later, a friend who emailed to say that her fourth and final bout of chemo is over without much promise of it having defeated the cancer it battled.

I feel deeply sobered by these people's stories. I don't know how else to put it. It puts my life into perspective. It suggests a posture of courage instead of willy-nilly panic. What I want most of all these days is two-fold: a night away with my husband and a fabulously interesting part-time job. What I see in my friends' lives, though, shifts my perspective into gratitude and fortitude, an awareness of the crocuses in my garden, the coffee in the pot, the general good health we enjoy.

When the Dog Bites

2011-03-29T22:29:00.004-04:00

No, no, no. I did not get bitten again. That was so early March. But while no new tragedies or insanity has befallen my family, some are lingering.

Tonight I began to think of the journal I kept when I was in late high school in the late 1980s. I have that journal somewhere in a box in the basement. It's floral covered with big unlined pages and I wrote my idealistic thoughts and observations in it - as well as my Top 10 Lists of Boys I Liked - using a fountain pen.

One day I decided to make a list of my favourite things. It became a full page of sensory detail. When I found the journal and the list a few years ago, I was happily surprised by how many of the things on the list I still liked.

So given that the dog has bitten - literally and figuratively - this month, I thought I would create a list of my current favourite things. Please feel free to share your own list in the comment section below.

Summer rain on a flat metal roof.
The smell of the ocean.
Dark coffee and the baristas who remember how I take it
Grana Padano cheese
Pino Grigio in a thin wine glass
Cashmere socks
Wind
Choral music on a winter's night
Sting
Cross-country skiing
Swimming
Naming things, pets and people
Laughing until tears pour down my face
The back of a baby's neck
The leg muscles of a runner
Twilight (not the book nor the movie)
Stewart & Colbert
Arugula from the garden
Purring
Wit
Trying to speak another language and the accompanying charm it requires
Skinnydipping
Collecting sea glass
Scented violets
Three year olds
Dancing
The montage at the end of the Olympics that makes me cry
Freesia
Cedar
Henry Moore sculptures
Michelangelo Bound Slave sculptures
Cinnamon
Making a feast
Dark chocolate
Montreal bagels
Thunderstorms
Someone making food for me
A clean counter
Flowering bulbs in the winter
Pussy willows
The ache of bare trees in late autumn
Forgiveness
Garbage trucks that take it all away
Good neighbours
Finding the perfect gift
Robins
The ideas of children
The laughter of children
Goofy teenagers
Room temperature drinking water - cool but not cold
Playing Hide and Seek
Thursdays
Dreams
Line-dried cotton sheets
Dictionaries
The right word
Black licorice
A good story
Magenta
Farmers Markets: particularly ByWard, St.Lawrence and Santa Croce
Olive trees
Orange blossoms
Brushing against a tomato plant
Painted toenails
Bedtime conversation
Whales

Saying the Unsayable

2011-03-21T14:10:00.005-04:00

Let me plot for you the trajectory of my Facebook life over the last month or so:

1. Urgent request for health information when dizzy stomach flu hit my house.
2. Missives from the front.
3. Brief psychotic break* with short postcards from my Walter Mitty-esque adventures.
4. lower case phrases exhibiting inability to raise my energy level to the height of a capital or a full sentence
5. Small observations about the good things in life.
6. General silence.

Facebook and I have long had a complicated relationship, as you no doubt know. This winter, I came to terms with Facebook largely - and recognized that it was not entirely benign but the larger issues were mine. Dealing with that, rather than quitting the site, was how I decided to proceed.

So this isn't a rant against social media. Just an observation.

My life has been a series of unfortunate events for the last month or so, and I have lost the ability to discuss this on Facebook. In spare moments - or stolen ones like this one - I'm trying to understand why this is.

I'm not someone who posts my prettiest self on Facebook, so it isn't that I think "if you can't say anything nice..."

It kind of relates to my theory that as troubles increase, self-pity must decrease. There simply isn't room for it. And how do you blithely announce to all and sundry the latest trouble?

I do fear I will come across as Debbie Downer - I know I do when I list all the Stuff.

But it's also that what is happening is too real to toss off lightly to the masses. People half-read things - whether it's here or on Facebook or anywhere. People who read my earlier posts on Facebook (when I was in Stage II as listed above) meet me on the street and say, "So, you've been sick, eh?" For the record, I am the last one standing - or as my corrected friend said, "You're the Immunity Idol."

That's the other thing. Sometimes it's all so bad, it's funny. And sometimes something beautiful and tender and true happens - and it would cheapen it all to say it on the social network.

A man from our church died recently and I found out about it on Facebook. Let me say clearly how deeply wrong I believe it was for the information to be passed along in that public way.

Weirdly though, the very best thing that has happened in the midst of all this has a Facebook connection too. A friend of a Facebook friend helped me to ease the burden of the person in my life who is struggling the most. There was miracle and persistence and coincidence and serendipity and providence and gift and relief - but there was also Facebook as the vehicle.

So, far be it from me to condemn the thing just now. It's just that I have no words.

* Disclaimer: Not a real psychotic break.